Chapter 1: What were the key moments of the Preston vs. Pompey match?
Preston 1 Pompey 0 and I was geared up to say that that was a goalless draw that we lost because it was wasn't it it was a goalless draw it had goalless draw written all over it the weather the state of their pitch the state of their pitch but it was a goalless draw and then the last part of the game particularly the last 10 or 15 minutes it was our game
And we could not only have equalised, we could have won it. We just didn't get any luck in their box. People will argue that we weren't sharp enough, creative enough, whatever. But we just didn't get the rub of the green. The rub of the green, the luck of the draw. Football's very much about those sorts of things. Most sports are, actually.
But maybe football in particular has to do... I remember Sven-Goran Eriksson, when he was asked about the difference between two teams, he said sometimes it's simply the coat of paint on the posts. And you can see what he means by that. And that's pretty much how it was against Preston. We were the better side. We were. Easily, actually. Just look at the corner count.
I mean, any clever gambler who plays spot gambling, who backed corners, is currently rolling in money. We were so superior to them in so many ways. But they got a fluke goal. Come back to that in a second. We're not tall enough.
And the one thing that I carried with me from the first half was one of their first corners, probably their only corner, actually, in which I was looking at who was marking who. And at this level in football, it's determined previously. You know, you don't just pick up some loose guy if you're defending a corner. You don't just pick up one of their players in the box and say, oh, I'll have him.
And it was clear that Chaplin had been designated to mark Odeluga Ophir. He's 6'2", going 6'6". And Chaplin isn't. And it was almost hilarious. It was very brave of him to actually get confrontational and physical with a fire, which he was doing. He was blocking him, holding him, arguing with him, making his life difficult.
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Chapter 2: How did luck play a role in the match outcome?
And it was, you know, like a Laurel and Hardy situation. A huge guy and a very, very not huge guy. Anyway, just as a matter of interest, so you can picture how big O'Fire is, his uncle is a guy called Martin O'Fire, a legendary rugby player, rugby union and rugby league, who was beyond huge and beyond quick. And O'daluga has got an awful lot of his attributes.
So I think that one of Martin O'Fire's other nephews also plays professional rugby union for Bath. But O'daluga O'Fire was huge and fast. And we had nobody better to mark him than Conor Chaplin. We need some height and we need some beef. We've started to recruit it. And it can't come too soon. Because let's talk about corners for just a second. We had, was it 14 of them?
And they were all innocuous, I think. We may have got it into the mix once. That's what you want to do. Get it into the mix. Get it into the six-yard box, bibbling around on the deck. Unless you've got, you know, Shocknessy, who will meet it perfectly with his forehead and bury it. But he isn't available. So we've got to hope that it bobbles and we get it into the mix.
I'm not going to dwell on the fact that I believe four of our corners at least went straight out of play. And one commentator said that this could have something to do with the fact that the pitch is awful and the area around the pitch is even more awful. And that makes taking corners in particular really challenging. Let's assume for the sake of Segacic, who's a great player.
No, not a great player, but he's got real promise. Didn't have his best game yesterday. He cut inside onto his left foot pretty much every time he got the ball so the full-back knew exactly how to deal with him. And his final effort, even if he found himself in some space and able to deliver something, a straightforward pass or a telling pass, it tended not to happen.
So it wasn't his best performance, but... We know what he can do and we're still huge fans, huge fans.
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Chapter 3: What tactical mistakes affected the team's performance?
But his corners were not the best. Did it matter? We don't score a lot of goals from corners. We started not to concede a lot of goals from corners and that's almost as important as scoring goals from corners and set pieces. Their goal was a fluke. It was a straightforward fluke. People were being polite and I heard commentators saying that he picked his spot. No, he didn't.
They did well to create the opportunity. No two ways about that. Terry Devlin will probably have conversations with John Massino and his colleagues in coaching about how the guy managed to free up enough space to pick out a decent cross. He wasn't looking, I don't think, for the goal scorer. Divine, wasn't it? There was some confusion about who actually got it. But he was in space.
And the idea that he decided to send a looping header beyond Schmidt to his left that went in off the bar and could very easily have hit the bar or gone over the bar or round the post because it was perfectly placed in the top corner. But it was a loopy thing. It was a loopy, tantalising, in times gone by, we would have called it a girly effort in terms of what the ball was doing.
It was innocuous, is a more scientific description of the effort on goal. And it got the goal. And I think nobody was more surprised than the goal scorer himself. And suddenly we're 1-0 down. And because of the nature of the game, which was a goalless draw. It was a goalless draw all day long.
But if you nick one, if you fluke one, then you're laughing because it's going to stay the same unless somebody else flukes something. We came so close with so many good efforts, particularly at the death of the game. But we had goal scoring opportunities before that. Didn't Ali play well? The touchline area where he was operating was, it was a mud pie.
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Chapter 4: How did the pitch conditions impact the game?
It was awful. I want to take a second out here to just comment on the fact that a number of... I'm going to be disparaging about the Ipswich fans that were saying this, and I'm going to be rude, and I'm going to call them yokels. Tractor boys, they call themselves. I'll call them yokels.
And they were blithering away, foam-mouthed, that Pompey should forfeit the game, should be fined, all sorts of things, because our pitch isn't up to scratch.
Well, I'm sure they don't bother to look at other games in the championship, but if they did, they've only got to have a look at the state of that pitch that that game was played on today and realise that there are actually pitches in the championship. which are seriously below standard.
That pitch was so appalling, you could have been watching Match of the Day in 1970, because that's what football pitches used to be like all those years ago before the technology caught up. They would simply be mud pies from goal to goal, from touchline to touchline. There was not a blade of grass on some of them.
Now, the Preston pitch wasn't quite as bad as that, but as far as playing decent football goes, when the ball comes to you and it's bouncing in front of you on a pitch like that, you simply don't know how and where to take it. which is the reason I'd like to think why Ali missed that opportunity in the goal mouth when I think it was a result of maybe one of our few successful corners.
The ball suddenly fell. It was a cross anyway, for sure. And the ball suddenly fell to him for a half volley and it was right in front of goal and he didn't have anybody bearing down on him. He had the opportunity to take his time and bury it or at least make contact with it.
get anywhere near it with his swing but he didn't was that the pitch a little bit I'd like to think so and it did make a difference he played really well he was he was incisive he was enthusiastic he wanted the ball he was always doubled up on they always had two men on him and he was potent
And he is an asset. And we've got somebody on the left now. There have been various injury stories circulating unofficially about Josh Murphy. And if his injury is as debilitating as some of the rumors suggest, then at least we have got somebody down the left
who can do some of the things that Murphy can only just do, which is beat men in, you know, I mean, his dribbling, his step over, and his speed away from the step over to get the cross in is seriously impressive. Over on the right we're a little bit shaky because Seggs isn't really a right winger.
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Chapter 5: What were the standout performances from players?
He's not a number nine. He's an old-fashioned inside forward, if you go back that far. But he did a valiant job of leading the line, as they say. A couple of people who had good games that we're now just getting used to. Always having good games. I'm going to mention Connor Ogilvie. What is he like? He got a whack from their Serbian guy. Big guy. He got a whack.
And Ogilvie's head went back like Mike Tyson had given him the killer blow. And his head went back. And you went, ooh! And you didn't expect him to get up. And he did sit there for a bit. But for some reason he was rubbing his leg. He... And then he just got up and he got on with it. He limped back into position slightly and he just got on with it because he's Conor Ogilvie.
You know, you've got to come from somewhere as far away as Serbia not to realise that that's Conor Ogilvie. They'd never heard of him in Serbia. They have now. You can't knock him over. Well, you can, but he gets straight up. So he had a great game in every respect. He wins so many 50-50s, so many aerial duels.
If I was coaching Pompey, I would say at corners and set pieces, since we don't have anybody who's six foot two, three, four at the moment, out on the pitch, aim for Connor. He wins his headers. Devlin's the same. Not a big guy, but he wins his headers.
Chapter 6: How did the team address their height and physicality issues?
But I'm leaving the best till last, and that is Dezel. What have we done to deserve him? to pick him up for less than nothing from QPR, remaindered by QPR. And we picked him up. And a lot of people went, have we sunk to this? We're picking up QPR rejects. They're down towards the bottom of the league. They're nobodies. And they don't want him. And we're picking him up. And look at him now.
He's in his pomp. No, he is. He's absolutely in his pomp. He bosses the pitch. Adams, the current folk hero, he does a bit of bossing. Marlon Pack came on and was Marlon Pack. Isn't he statuesque? But throughout the game, Andre Dazelle was the Pope. He was completely the Pope. He was winning everything, he was everywhere, and he was putting in some really telling passes.
And I think he now fancies himself a little bit, and we hope he does, because it's important, as being a little bit of a, not a Glenn Hoddle, if you go back that far, but somebody who can send a telling pass through, straight through, forward, a forward pass, We know that John Massino talks to his players about making forward passes, as well as going back and sideways.
And by the way, just as an aside, I started at one point to count the number of back passes that Pompey made to Schmidt. From the 25th minute to about the 33rd minute, there were eight of them. And that, you know, is significant. It never used to happen in football. Back passes were almost unheard of. But... We do a lot of them, partly because we're thinking about building from the back.
Chapter 7: What were the challenges with set pieces during the match?
And we have to build from the back because we don't have anybody up front that we can send a long ball to. And Preston knew that, so they decided to press us when Schmidt had the ball. Because Schmidt wanted to play it short. Because he knew that if he played it long, it would come back again.
So there was some fairly basic tactics there, not top-end, top-range tactics, but there were certain tactics that were going on. And that was one of them, for sure. It was a terrible pitch. There were a lot of back passes. Odeluga Ofaya, a giant of a man, was being marked by Conor Chaplin at corners, which was hilarious. Their goal was a fluke.
We drew that 0-0, but the records will show that we lost it 1-0 and the league table, well thank goodness we got a game in hand on absolutely everybody, two games in hand on almost everybody. down amongst the dead men.
Just one thing I want to mention very quickly, and I won't dwell on it because it's a bit pedantic, and that is that I watched the game and I saw there was not a single legal throw-in. No. Yeah. Every single throw-in that was taken by both sides, and there would have been dozens of them, were illegal. The law states very clearly that the ball has to be taken behind the head.
And then over the head. And absolutely nobody did that. Everybody, all the players, placed the ball just above the top of their head. Like, you know Callum Lang's goal celebration where he puts his fingers in his ears and twiddles his fingers? They had the ball there, right above their heads, not behind their heads, which is what the law says. And then they would just sort of flick it forward.
And back in the day, every single one of those throw-ins would have been a foul throw. But it's clear to me that there is an unspoken word amongst officials, and I think the players are aware of it, that you can do that now just to get the game going. Because throw-ins are not necessarily to your advantage. And so anything you can do to benefit the side that's taking the throw...
worth doing so turning a blind eye to the fact that the law is being broken over and over and over again doesn't matter and they'll probably change the law sometime fairly soon to the ball must be taken from above the head and then thrown forward small point but once you notice it you see you start to get apoplectic about it and a little bit sort of you know
Get a bee in your bonnet, as the phrase used to be. Well, the bee in my bonnet for that game is that we deserved a point.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of this match for the team's future?
And maybe even three, actually. But, look at the paper in the morning, or rather, look at your screen in the morning and you will see that, undeservedly, we lost that one. Preston won. Pompey nil.