Tuesday, 3 February 2015

The Cherries were never overly stretched at the back by Hornets

With Watford basically playing the whole of the match with 10 men they were always up against it to take the game to AFCB. That they did for some moments of the game is testament to the fact that Watford are no easy push overs even when a man light. Their attackers and midfield players had to put in a big shift and with Bournemouth's passing style they simply found that chasing the ball for 90 minutes was a tiring task.

The possession that AFCB enjoyed was not easily obtained. In the first half Watford tried to press as much as they could but the width that the Cherries play with seemed key to getting the victory. How many times did we see cross ball from Ritchie to Pugh or from Cook to Ritchie? The speed and movement of the passing was too much in the end for the Hornets and I don't think 2-0 flattered the Cherries.
AFCB's defenders were a closed shop against Watford.
Considering Watford only managed one shot on target, AFCB could not have played much better than that. I know the first half was difficult and Troy Deeney was a handful taking on three of our players at once on some occasions but Tommy Elphick and Steve Cook kept him and Odion Ighalo quiet for most of the game. I also felt the dismissal of Gabriele Angella was important from the set piece point of view as Watford rely on Angella to get his head to a lot of corners and that threat was simply removed from the start.

While Artur Boruc did not have a lot to do it was his nervy kicking that had many fans a bit worried at the start of the match. It was noticeable that he changed to throwing for distributing the ball from the back and the couple of misplaced passes he made to the left side of the field were soon put behind everyone. Artur will simply say it was another clean sheet and you can't really argue with that.

No comments:

Post a Comment

tag: