Rovers can’t go up a gear
BLUE-EYED BOY
TO lose one game by a 3-2 margin may be unfortunate; some may say to go down twice by the same scoreline in four days is gross negligence.
But let’s be quite honest. Any tenuous claim to have been hard done to by the scoreline or the referee at Deepdale are understandable to a small extent but the soul-sappingly dispiriting (in many different ways) loss to Brighton was a good old seeing-to merely dressed up as a five-goal thriller.
From the inevitable moment Brighton won their first corner which everyone in the ground – not very many in actual fact – knew would land squarely on panto villain Shane Duffy’s napper, there was only one winner of this game.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve said the same things about our dismal home record (3 wins in 11 this season, 11 wins in the last 34 home league games) and the manner in which football looks the most difficult sport in the world for us while simultaneously the easiest pastime going for many of our visitors.
We simply don’t have a gear beyond second while teams repeatedly pick us off with speed of thought and movement they can switch on and off at a moment’s requirement.
Our centre midfield is laughably limited and talentless while the players who ought to be providing an outlet even given those limitations are onedimensional, predictable, out of form or simply can’t be bothered.
I tracked down a copy of brilliant local author Harry Berry’s rare 1988 book “Blazing Bullets, Blackburn’s Most Memorable Goals,” last week, written before the Premier League was dreamed of, top-flight football was an even more distant memory for us than it is now and Alan Shearer was probably hoping for a Christmas tip for cleaning Danny Wallace’s boots.
In the book, discussing a typical Simon Garner strike, Harry describes the style of Ian “Windy” Miller, the right-winger Rovers signed from Swindon in 1981 who typified our modest aspirations and abilities for the rest of the decade.
“Miller had one gambit,” said Berry, “he ran strongly, in a straight line, and crossed the ball with complete orthodoxy.”
On Saturday at Deepdale shortly after halftime, Craig Conway received the ball on halfway and ran strongly, in a straight line, before releasing it. I know it was a straight line because he followed a painted one, the half-way line, in an exercise in utter futility which was a metaphor for his own lack of form, the confusing way we are set up and of course the complete dearth of options provided by his “static and bewildered” (as another old pal puts it) teammates.
The one time in the derby game that Rovers actually passed and moved the ball around crisply, quickly, regularly with purpose they fashioned the second equaliser which demonstrated that if you move the opposition around too and force them out of their comfort zone, gaps will appear.
There was no brilliant turn, back-heel or completely unexpected directional switch in the buildup to Danny Graham’s second but it amply displayed that these are jobbing Championship players and midfielders you’re playing against, they’ll make mistakes and lose concentration just the way we do if you extend them a little bit.
An all-too-predictable lapse of concentration – Marshall isn’t a full- back’s cousin - cost what would have justifiably considered a decent point, although any other team in such second-half ascendancy might have cashed in on a fading PNE.
There were no such hard-luck interpretations to be put forward on Tuesday however. While our players charged with creativity look as if they are trying to find a way out of a maze made of labyrinthine twelve-foot high shrubs, repeatedly Brighton’s raiders drove directly at our hearts through the middle.
You can take the nippy likes of Knockaert, Baldock, and Hemed doing so with their pace but five minutes into the second half Duffy ran virtually unchallenged from his own half to the edge of our box as if possessed by the spirit of Ruud Krol – when did we last see anyone do that, never mind a big lump of a centre half?
While the narrow margin of defeat suggests a competitive edge, in truth following Duffy’s opener we were in the game for about four minutes after Gallagher’s well-taken first and for 10 seconds after his excellent but merely consolational second. Greer’s crazy dismissal was not what you expect from such a seasoned, consummate pro but perhaps entirely the consequence of the scrambled brain of a 36-year-old who’s been in and out of the side with injury, returning in a match in which he is expected to compete with confident top-of-theleague greyhounds.
What we do for a centre-half pairing against another side going well, Reading, on Saturday is anyone’s guess but both that department and those immediately further behind and further up the field will need to do a whole lot better if the ability of our strikers to do their share is to be profited upon.