by Victor Meldrew »
02 Sep 2019 11:04
Snowball Forbury Lion
(Raphael)
Did I see it right (wasn't 100% sure from my angle of view), but it looked as though he decided not to stand in the middle of the goal and instead to one side leaving a much wider opening on one side that. The Charlton penalty taker accepted the invitation to score on that side and in it went.
He plays a lot of mind games. Worked brilliantly at Wycombe.
He gave an obvious right side to shoot at (a bit TOO big) but note he dived on the narrow side.
It's 50/50 if you do nothing. He was clearly hoping he'd persuade Taylor to go for the narrow side.
I think he will save a good number of penalties.
I would rather he didn't have many penalties to save.
Before the game my brother and I were talking about Lyle Taylor and how we both rated him, going back to his Wimbledon days and before that he had been at Bournemouth .
Pete asked me if I had seen any of his penalties-I hadn't but he told me what he does and he thought the best thing would be for the keeper to stand still centrally and because of the pace of the shot he might have time to reach it.
We then wondered if RFC staff had discussed with our keeper what he should do if they did get a penalty-who knows if they did?
As for the game, Yiadom looked knackered so understandable that he might come off but Richards IMHO was still doing ok.
I think I would have stuck with the game plan but played somebody else as wing-back (Barrett?) rather than Meite who cuts in on his left foot and crowds the central area rather than going outside his man.
There was definitely a case for the front two to come off as both had been ineffective and were tiring but hindsight is easy and Gomes obviously thought he was doing the right thing.
I had fallen pre-match into the trap thinking that this team is going places-they still might but to do so every player has to be at their best, anything less is not enough as they are not THAT good.
Moore I thought was very poor as were the front two but let's just hope that they were all a bit tired and this was a one-off-in the first half we saw quite a bit of the new Reading but as we didn't score we then saw too much of the old Reading in the second half.