RogerTheAlien wrote:

Most teams in this league has a recognised goal scorer apart from us. Metsoko, Rose and Sapsford just aren’t good enough.

 
I don’t know about that. Celtic and Rangers do because they can afford to spend money on proven goalscorers. Hearts the same to a lesser extent, but take Braga out their team, none of their other 9’s are just punts. Motherwell have one, but the guy didn’t start scoring goals till into his second season there. Hibs don’t have one, Nisbet’s very hot and cold at Aberdeen, mostly cold. The rest have all just got mostly punts up there, hoping they come good, just like we have.

Given how bad the striker market is, I kinda understand that it’s gonna be incredibly difficult for a club at our level to find one, and it’ll be more luck than anything if we do. What I don’t like, is that Goodwin and co had all summer and about 4 league games and still couldn’t figure out that the two we have signed look questionable at best (And on first impressions, god awful in Metsoko’s case), and decided not to sign a third one to bolster our options.

Cast your mind back to Dalby, that wasn’t some proven goalscorer we’d managed to somehow get in. Everyone, including me had him down as an absolute donkey after his first few games. When he signed, we were all greeting about needing a striker with pace to come in, not another big carthorse that looks like he’s running in treacle. He never scored for about 8 games, and didn’t properly get going for about another 8 games after that.

I don’t see the same happening with the two we have, but it’s one area of the pitch I give the club a bit of slack on because there’s so few good proven options out there. The Premier League is a testament to that. The big clubs are spending £50-100m on mediocre strikers like Sesko, Gyokeres, Nunez, Nicolas Jackson, Liam Delap, Solanke, Richarlison etc. If you can’t even get a quality, proven 15-20 goal a season striker for that sort of money, what chance have we got?

David_Blunkett wrote:

Jon Daly looked hopeless until he got his first goal.

We're creating enough chances, now whether Rose or Metsoko are the answer remains to be seen, but they were signed to be the focal point, yet in our last 3 games, they've started on the bench.

Goals breed confidence, yet we're having to play a certain way because we're playing Sapsford through the middle.

Decide which of the two is the best option, the one that's gonna make the best runs/movement and the one that'll get on the end of crosses and give them a run of games.

Maybe one of them comes good, i'd be inclined to go with Rose, he's actually our player.


 

 
I agree on Sapsford. He’s never a striker. He should only play there in emergencies. If hems gonna play, he needs to play as an inside forward, cutting in off the left. He can’t play with hi back to the goal up against centre halves that give him no space.

I think people are being a bit harsh on Rose. His finishing is a bit scruffy, but that can be improved. He has other attributes that lead me to think he’s our best option. He’s quick and he’s the rare type of player that actually presses properly, not just the half arsed, for show way that a lot of players do. Teams don’t like that. I see a lot of similarities to the United version of Simon Murray with him in terms of his playing style and having a great attitude to the game, we managed to get something out of him once he settled in to the team.

Agree VAR is a joke in scotland, and elsewhere, there is just no consistency

Hearts v Dundee yesterday, hearts get a penalty because a defender handles the ball as he makes a sliding tackle. It looks like he is making a genuine tackle and unintentionally his arm touches the ball as he is on the way down. Penalty and arguably the turning point in the game.

Compare that to the goal celtic scored at  tannadice, where their big numpty striker is falling down and backwards, and palms the ball back to his team mate who scores. No handball given as it was judged to be accidental.

A lot of what I wanted to post about has been covered above, but my thoughts on Saturday are that was pretty grim.

The two biggest team failings were our ability to do the basics right and we appeared to be quite far behind Falkirk in fitness.

For large chunks of the first half we were slack in passing, half hearted in our tackling, there was no urgency and we gave Falkirk the run of Tannadice.

We are weak as piss water up front and Sapsford especially looked like he didn't want to be there.  He couldn't have looked more uninterested if he tried, unfortunately even trying to look uninterested was too much of an effort for him on Saturday.

Bennie is shite.  Since he's signed, he's had one good pass and little else.  I hope he hasn't burned his chances of a cap with Australia because I doubt he'll ever get to pull on a Scotland strip unless he buys it off DH Gate.

Camara was doing his best impression of one of those inflatable things you see dancing outside car sales rooms.  He was as gangly as I've ever seen him and he just couldn't control the ball.  He's lost a lot of what he had last season and I don't know why.

Let's also be honest here, Rawlins is dug shit.  His football is almost as bad as his hair cut.

The way we set up to defend corners is going to cost us a lot this season.  If you're defending corners zonally, you have to have the type of players who'd header their granny in the zonal roles.  For example, Bert has been playing well predominantly this season, but he's not that kind of player to defend a corner zonally.

Distribution from the back needs to change.  Unfortunately, we don't have that outlet to mix things up.  Again, the recruitment has stifled our ability to change things or keep the opponents guessing as to what we're going to do.   We have to play it out from the back because the keepers distribution is suspect and lets face it, we don't have any forward players that appear to be that good in the air.

I'm glad that we changed our formation from last season and hope we continue to play more attack minded, but we need to have the ability to switch it up a bit from time to time.  As things stand, we are far too predictable.

Positives for me, Iqbal and Cameron look very good and Yoro seemed to be a bit more settled and composed from previous outings.  Forbes took his goal very well and I enjoyed watching Randall when he got into his groove.

We still need to sort out the RB slot and get someone in who knows how to find the back of the net and maybe even a big lump of a target man to give us another option upfront.

Can't really add much to what others have said, but few things on my mind...

McGlynn coaches his teams to be sneaky fuc*ers.  If you watch the goal back, Tait is marking the boy Murrel, and just as he makes his run, a Falkirk player steps in front of Tait and knocks him over.  I think Bert has to attack the ball, but Tait lost his man to a smart move.

The amount of times that our players would jump for a ball and they would give us a nudge was a joke, but we never seemed to moan about it.

The ref was poor..albeit for both sides, but through my tangerine specs he was very bad for us.  Rose ran through Strain at one point (which I'm sure was a wee message after he ran half the pitch to shout at Randall) and he got a Yellow.  About 15 minutes later, same exact foul happens on the JK side and the ref doesn't blink.  The foul Iqbal got against him while winning the ball was laughable.

For me, as others have mentioned - it's a striker we're missing.  Failure to address this will leave us in bother.

Last edited by dyed in the wool (Today 9:52 am)