There is one expression that really gets under my skin;
“They wanted it more!”
Did Shrewsbury perform the better than us over the two legs? YES!
And just because they performed better, did Shrewsbury’s players want it more than our players? NO!
I certainly felt we tried over the two legs, but we certainly didn’t lack effort at all. We just lacked crucial killer quality. Shrewsbury simply showed why they have been in an automatic promotion race most this season and why we were in and out of the top six this season. And why we were 16 points behind after 46 games.
Both sets of players were just as desperate to win as each other but Shrewsbury just got to grips with pressure of the occasion better than us. Simple as all that.
No I personally don’t believe in terms of quality we deserved to go through. I am not denying that.
I think it was a great effort in the last ten league games to get ourselves in the top 6 after it seemed to be slipping away after a poor run of form which included Blackpool and Fleetwood. And again after the Scunthorpe loss.
If we had gone up I feel we would have had a lot to do in the transfer market. But with ownership situation and the manager situation maybe even more so.
And going back a few years, talking about the “They wanted it more” expression, as bad as we were bad on the day, never once have I ever believed that Sheffield United wanted it more in the FA Cup 6th round. I was going to put a post at the time about it but with Powelly leaving I got waylaid.
In competitive sport only one person or team can get the prize. Sometimes you perform well and you win and sometimes you lose. Sometimes you don’t perform well for whatever reason and you lose. Sometimes you get lucky and win. That is just sport all over. But in all reality competitors are always as desperate as each to achieve that precious goal.
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Millwall
Gets right up my hooter.
“I told them to go out and enjoy themselves,”
gets right up my hooter.
So what should I have said to my son and his friends when they went to the park?
As far as we are concerned it's not even necessarily about wanting it more, but also confidence and belief. When they scored yesterday we still had nearly 30 minutes to try to pull it back but the belief had gone - the ref might as well have blown up then and there we all knew it was over at that point including the players.
Shit Set piece taking doesn't account for being bullied.
Every pass the striker receives they have their back to goal.
Ability to cross from open play.
All these things need addressing and more.
One I don’t like is when the reason we lost is because the players had “no passion”. It’s rarely down to that, missing chances, making mistakes and bad defending isn’t often down to a lack of effort.
Better the devil you know.
Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
Four favourite phrases those that back RD.
The truthful statement surely is “They were better than us” - and I don’t know why people are afraid of saying that.
I think the expression refers to being able to sustain that belief and desire through adversity (e.g. going a goal down, not getting the rub of the green etc).
Arsene Wenger often uses the expression "we lacked a little bit mental strength".
Same thing.
It's about single minded drive to make it happen whatever.
Which personalities will step up and prevail.
In short, who wants it more.
Nolan should have had at least one yellow, then you had the Morris elbow and numerous other incidents of over physicality that Shrewsbury dished out. For me the ref bottled a lot of decisions on Sunday.
Shrewsbury were well organised, broke with pace and deserved their win.
But it does exist though. Let's take the Rochdale game, at HT we knew we were heading for the play offs and Rochdale knew they had to score to stay up. So in the second half, yes they did "want it more" and rightly so.
With regards to the play offs, of course we wanted to win. But let's not kid ourselves, not every single professional footballer is desperate to win every game. If you think of work and our colleagues, how many come to work desperate for the company to succeed and how many come purely because they are getting paid. I realise football is different but I have no doubt we had players on that pitch who weren't particularly bothered about the result. If he had come on, Zyro would have been one of them.