Argyle Röhl'd over: Worst Case Scenario a Reality After Shambolic Wednesday Display
Argyle Röhl'd over: Worst Case Scenario a Reality After Shambolic Wednesday Display
And a call for calm...for now
“A pile of streaming ship” is the way the Argyle kit man would have summed up the inaugural outing of Wayne Rooney’s Argyle on Sunday. His tenure couldn’t have gotten off to a worse start.
The one thing the club needed to offset a swell of negativity and calls of ‘I told you so’ was to ensure that Rooney’s Argyle put out a coherent and competent display at Hillsborough.
Wednesday hadn’t lost since April, and came out flying, and easily Rohl’d over a listless Argyle.
But the manner of the defeat is extremely concerning and risks derailing the season.
Let’s pick apart some of the issues.
An unmitigated shambles
From my research trip to Bristol Rovers in pre-season, there were a number of concerning attributes to Wazball that gave me an uneasy feeling ahead of the season. I mentioned many of them in both the Bristol Rovers report and the mini season preview before the weekend.
Argyle’s inability to play through Rover’s press that day rang an alarm bell – as did the complete lack of the central midfield two to impact the game.
In the preview I wrote:
“We’ve looked lopsided, and with the LB inverting, and it means the RB tends to tuck in. That means no-one running past Whittaker, which somewhat reduces his threat. We’ve also looked vulnerable down our left. The two CMs need to do a lot of defensive work – and also make us tick going forward.”
All of that was evident in abundance against Wednesday.
As I mentioned in that post-Rovers newsletter:
“Rovers will be far from the most effective pressing unit we’ll face this season, and they had Argyle’s number. And they pressed us into a series of haphazard errors, one leading to the first goal.”
Wednesday, playing the Redbull brand of high intensity football, savaged us. We were rabbits in the headlights, and perhaps only Cissoko came out with any credibility.
It did look as if Argyle had weathered the storm early on. Wednesday came out flying with six corners in the first 20 minutes, but Argyle defended resolutely. We then made openings of our own, and I thought we’d get a handle on the game, and we sort of did. But error after error saw the momentum swing back in Wednesday’s favour.
Rooney was right to call out the players for their usage of the ball and lack of intensity – but they looked like 10 strangers; lost, with zero outball, zero plan and zero ideas. It should have been six or seven nil.
The 4-4-2
Argyle were simply not able to implement any of their attacking ideas against Wednesday.
Ogbeta – who didn’t appear to know what he was doing – spent the game neither in his defensive position, nor getting us up the pitch or inverting into the midfield. The midfield was overrun, with Bannon orchestrating the game, Forshaw chasing shadows and Gyabi MIA.
Argyle attacks petered out with some limp chipped ball forward, or hopeless balls upfield. I cannot think of one spell of sustained possession in the game, where our CMs got on the ball, and brought those around them into the game. It shone a spotlight onto the lack of central control.
While I don’t expect Rooney to change after one game – and it would be worrying if he had so little confidence in his style that we abandoned it so quickly – we don’t seem well suited to the 4-4-2. But chatter about what might be better can be left for another day.
A call for calm
But this newsletter can also be a call for calm…for now. No manager deserves to be judged on 90 minutes of football. The worst possible start doesn’t necessarily mean the worst possible outcome.
The performance reminded me of the Pizza Cup Final. The same scoreline, the same clueless car-crash of a game. If it was a boxing match you’d have stopped it at 60 minutes.
I’d also reference the Charlton 5-1, the Exeter 4-0. All of those games lost by the same margin, all by what turned out to be promotion winning sides.
Just because we got humiliated by one of our close rivals on TV, on the opening day of the season, with the whole world watching, doesn’t mean we are condemned to being the new Rotherham (right now, I feel we probably are). A huge reaction is needed.
That said, that game has drastically reduced the amount of leeway I’m prepared to give Rooney until I start hitting the panic button. I need to see a coherent performance at home on Saturday*, or there’s going to be fireworks.
*I won’t because mercifully I am going to a music festival which notoriously has no signal.
One game is not cause to panic. But one game which demonstrated the flaws which were so evident in preseason….?? I agree, we need to see significant improvement on Saturday, not just from the players but from the coaches too, in terms of team selection and setup. We simply cannot afford to find ourselves adrift and looking for yet another manager. A successful gambler know when to cut losses.