Away Goals

[Sas_The_Hibby]

Has Hughes ever heard of the importance of away goals?

Or is the arithmetic beyond him? :confused:

[Woody1985]

:yawn:

[Liberal Hibby]

It's not away goals that win European ties - it's keeping the ball out of your own net. Hughes clearly understands this and set the team up to dominate possession and try to stop them scoring (or scoring too many). Sadly it didn't quite work out - partly because Maribor are a decent team from a decent footballing nation (not some lumpen backwater as some would have you believe) and partly because we looked half a yard off the pace - hardly surprising given where the teams were in their respective seasons.

It was a brave selection, but neither Riordan or Stokes are particularly suited to playing lone striker and Nish is clearly the better option if you're going to play one up front.

Going into this tie playing 4-4-2 might have got us an away goal - but I'd suspect they would have got a few more as well. Just because we looked a better team for the last 15 minutes with a certain formation doesn't mean that would have been the case for the previous 75. Maribor had won the game (and probably the tie) by the time the 'saviours' came on.

[bingo70]

Has Hughes ever heard of the importance of away goals?

Or is the arithmetic beyond him? :confused:

If only Yogi thought of that he would have got us to score 10 of them, seeing as we were obviously playing against some pub team i pressume it would have been that easy :confused:

[Sas_The_Hibby]

It's not away goals that win European ties - it's keeping the ball out of your own net. Hughes clearly understands this and set the team up to dominate possession and try to stop them scoring (or scoring too many). Sadly it didn't quite work out - partly because Maribor are a decent team from a decent footballing nation (not some lumpen backwater as some would have you believe) and partly because we looked half a yard off the pace - hardly surprising given where the teams were in their respective seasons.

It was a brave selection, but neither Riordan or Stokes are particularly suited to playing lone striker and Nish is clearly the better option if you're going to play one up front.

Going into this tie playing 4-4-2 might have got us an away goal - but I'd suspect they would have got a few more as well. Just because we looked a better team for the last 15 minutes with a certain formation doesn't mean that would have been the case for the previous 75. Maribor had won the game (and probably the tie) by the time the 'saviours' came on.

That would be fine if our defence was our strength - it's not. It's possible we would still have lost badly playing Riordan and Stokes from the start; IMHO not playing either of them, with the defence we've got, made it almost certain. I accept there's an amount of hindsight in this but I was gobsmacked when I heard the team before kick off.