Stoke 1-1 West Brom: Mr. Carlos Vela

Well, that one was interesting.  First half wasn’t much to watch, and honestly I found myself yawning afterwards.  Then, at the end I almost had a heart attack.   Well, that’s football I guess.  Anywho,

Positives:

-Well done to Uncle Roy using Meite today.  I admit that I almost forgot he was even on the team, but he was the perfect counter against the threat of Jones and Carew.  And, he played pretty well to boot, which doesn’t hurt his future chances.

-With that, the defense played another solid game.  Yeah, we failed to hold a clean sheet yet again, but that being said they coped with everything Stoke threw at them.

-The announcers picked up on this, and while it may be obvious I’ll state it anyway: any chances we get are going to have to come from our attacking middies (Thomas, Brunty, Dozza).  Their play will determine whether we stay in the prem or crash out.

Negatives:

-Conceding a goal from a set piece to Stoke is nothing unheard of.  Hell, that’s how they score 90% of their goals.  But to concede it to Rory Delap of all people?  That’s a shame.

-A couple of times it was weird how we would just clear the ball when we seemingly were away from any pressure and had a few pass lanes open.  But those are the tactics of Uncle Roy, so I guess we better get used to them.

Carlos Vela:

He deserves his own section after his cameo tonight yeah? After scoring against Wolves, I really wished he would start.  You could tell at the end that he knows what runs to make, and even if he only finishes some of his chances (example: today) we still wind up with points in the bag.  Granted, I wasn’t so proud of him after those misses at the end, but without him we wouldn’t have taken a point so I hope that he gets his chance soon enough.

So, all in all I think it’s a nice point.  Would be a lot nicer had we beaten Wolves and or West Ham, but hey, I’ll take it.  We can build on that for next weekend.

Category: Team News