Monday, 5 November 2018

Rashford's goal was hard to stop

Rashford receives praise after his late winner.
Nathan Aké seems to have taken Marcus Rashford's winner rather personally to heart. Judging the flight of the ball is not always easy for defenders in the box and I don't expect Nathan's team-mates will point any fingers at him. They are all in it together and on this one occasion they didn't quite manager to keep a good goalscorer away from the ball.

Marcus Rashford is a goal predator and just the striker ACB didn't need snapping around the heels of our defenders in the six yard box. Adam Smith did his best, but just couldn't stay on his feet to clear the ball. Eddie Howe will look at the wider issue though of why Bournemouth were being pushed back in those final minutes and why the cross was not stopped before it reached Rashford. Stopping the cross was the best way to stop the goal. Once the ball was in the box it was just a scrap to get to the ball first.

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Howe may also wonder if the late substitution of Surman coming on just took player's minds off their jobs for that one moment. The last few minutes of a match are nervy parts of the game and AFCB do have a habit of getting things wrong at these times, as we saw against Leicester and Chelsea earlier in the season. It was also a shame to concede as it ended the home record of being undefeated at Dean Court.

Having not conceded in the previous three games, there will be a bit more focus on the defence I'm sure ahead of the Newcastle match. Playing three at the back has enabled players to get forward, but at the end of the game it tends to be that AFCB have all their players falling back deep and, without the forward outlet, they do get penned in. It is also asking a lot of Callum Wilson to keep holding the ball up when he has done it for 90 minutes, but without Josh King there is not another strong holding attacker for Howe at the moment. 

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