How to chase a lead.....

Being a football supporter can be a frustrating business sometimes. There's so much stuff to get frustrated ABOUT, let's face it. Every time a pass is misplaced or a shot screwed wide there are howls from the stands. It's not obviously that the punters think they could have done better themselves, it's more of a disbelief that players as good as ours ever get it so badly wrong.

I think probably THE most frustrating things for me though are not individual errors. Sheesh I've played football enough times and made a mess of things enough times to know that it ain't as easy as these lads make it look. No, THE most frustrating thing for me to watch is when collectively we make the same errors time and time again, as a team.

I'm talking of course about how we approach it late on in games when we're behind. Collectively our approach is absolutely miles off, it almost looks as if we haven't actually got a plan at all. Our record at pulling games and points out of the fire is terrible, watching us it's easy to see why. I'd go as far as saying that if you were to make a video of how NOT to chase the game, we'd be a decent case study. For a team which is so excellent at protecting a lead (we are brilliant at it) to be quite so bad at chasing one is baffling to me, but it is what it is.

So where do we (in my opinion) go wrong? What is it that frustrates me so?

Firstly, when you are behind in a football match & you're inside the last fifteen minutes, your objective has to be to build pressure. In this and in every other aspect, the team trying to to defend the lead is seeking the direct opposite.

The best way of building pressure is to keep the ball in play, active, for as long and for as much of the time as is humanly possible. It obviously follows that the team defending the lead wants the game to be broken up, plenty of stoppages, delays etc. So (and sorry to continually bang on about this), YOU MUST NOT GIVE AWAY CHEAP FOULS. Yesterday once we'd gone behind young Josh Kelly left his foot in as the keeper cleared it, a pointless foul which cost us both momentum and 80 seconds. The goalkeeper cleared it into touch, it would have been OUR ball. Then Marcus Browne got away with one, only to immediately foul somebody else instead. As I've said lots of times, if it means you DON'T challenge where normally you would, so be it. Not giving away free kicks is almost more important than winning the ball back.

Similarly, you must do everything in your power to keep the ball on the pitch. If that means risking heading it back infield rather than out for a throw in as you normally would, once again so be it. Each time you concede a throw in, it's the best part of 60 seconds gone.

And then when you HAVE the ball, mix it up. Move it, probe, pull them around, look for the pass. If it doesn't come off, DON'T FOUL. Stay on your feet, pressure the ball, get it back, go again.

Honestly, if we get better at THAT part of the game, allied to how good we are at defending a lead, we'll smash past twenty points in our last ten games.