We Deserved A Point But Were Dunn and Dunne Over

Martin O’Neill departed from Ewood Park with a sense of frustration at our loss.

Speaking on the official site he described how we’d been ‘perfect’ away from home up until today and that he expected us to secure the win, or at the very least walk away with a share of the points.

He says how Gabby’s opener was the perfect start we were after and that even at halftime he was still confident we would go out and take all 3 points and he sounds at a loss to why we didn’t, offering:

‘Perhaps we didn’t create as many chances in the second-half as I thought we’d have done.’

Which of course is true. Carew was a non entity for the most part, the less said about the inclusion of Heskey the better – so we are already two players down in real terms.

Couple that with being over run again in the first half in midfield, so in the second half we take off a midfielder which will of course help wouldn’t it.

The final half hour our chances really were long range efforts or corners, yet again, we had nothing creative through the middle. We aren’t going to score many when the two target men we have – which should be ideal for wing play – seem scared to enter the penalty box and when you have nothing through the middle you get exactly what we did today. 5 chances on target in 90 minutes and an awe inspiring 5 chances off target.

Not creating many chances only works when you are tight in defence and you have a midfield taking charge. Again we didn’t have that, and today we got the result we deserved.

‘We were hoping to get something. Up until today we were perfect away from home. We were looking to continue in the same vein, but games here aren’t easy.’

Yeah results have been working out for us, but we saw last season what happens when we rely on winning games 1-0, eventually the own goals and penalties stop and ergo so do our 3 points. If we continue in this vein and do not learn the lessons that should’ve been dealt with over 18 months ago we’ll get the odd run of decent recents that makes everything thing we are Top 4 challengers and then we’ll pick up results that we deserve and everybody come the end of the season will be talking about how close we came, how well we did to finish 6th again.

Or maybe we’ll learn something, we’ll start actually playing proper football and winning games convincingly and maybe, just maybe we won’t throw away valuable points through sheer bloody mindedness and a 6th place finish could be a real achievement as opposed to last years capitulation of 4th place, then 5th place – basically an anti climax.

Monny also doesn’t believe the sending off of Grella aided us much, saying it possibly galvanised Blackburn’s resolve and we possibly tried to use a width advantage. That would be why Milner moved into the middle and Gabby and Heskey seemed glued to the left wing at the end then.

‘I don’t know whether it affected us in the sense that we tried to get a bit of extra width into the side to try and break through.’

That’ll be enough from me though, I’ve promised the lads on the forum a night off.