So according to Quest, it was our ‘dark arts’ on O’Hare

Yes, he did get fouled a few times second half, but no more, or even perhaps less than Palmer did in first half. The highlights opened with Coventry hitting the crossbar and no sign of our miss in the early minutes. I get it’s an highlights show, but do just that, show the near misses for both teams. Quest have just labelled us a cynical team, we’re far from being that.

 

I can't get upset at Quest's perception of us as a team.

 

Neither can I mate, just looking for some balance from so-called TV pundits but it was piss poor

 

I don't give a ****, in fact I love it, if they want to call us cynical then so be it! For years we've played pretty football but been soft as *****. Now we don't take **** off anyone, thanks to Val for toughening some of these younger players up a bit.

 

Let’s be honest it was a really poor performance today masked by us winning. Lets hope it was just the pressure of playing in front of a crowd again.

 

A

Agreed, how many times have teams shutdown our creative outlet and scrapped a win- then described as us losing to a more “experienced” team on the day? The point today was that they have 1 good player, maybe 2 if you include Dabo and we shut O’Hare down. Sometimes it seems we forget the point of football is also to stop the opposition. It’s not a noble sport or a gentleman’s game- it’s high stakes winner takes all cat fight - and who gives two fks what pundits think? We won, fk off.

 

Being called it, and deserving of it are not necessarily the same. I certainly don’t mind us being a bit physical, that’s not the point I’m making

 

Just because they saw it differently doesn’t mean they didn’t have a point.
Quest are generally well positive towards us and the answer is possibly somewhere in between.
How often have teams ‘ gone out of their way’ to stop our better strikers, and we have been caught out by trying to be overly fair.

 

The point is about balance, if they saw that Palmer’s treatment from Coventry was any different to what O’Hare received from us then they lose all credibility for me.

 

It's an easy and lazy narrative for them to go with after seeing how many bookings we accumulated.

 

So with all this fouling that was piled on him, is O’Hare in Barnsley General recovering? Or is he just good at convincing the ref?

 

I rate him as a player, but the way he jumped up over a Woodrow challenge, zero contact and then rolled around like a toddler was very disappointing.

Kitch dealt with him perfectly. Grab the little **** and let him know who's boss. The little child soon calmed down.

 

I reckon more than 90% of the Barnsley teams I've seen in my life would have lost today, and I love that we didn't. I think we played hard but fair in the main, and deserved maybe just over half the cards we got. There's no way it was 'dark arts' as a tactic.

 

Coventry have definitely been flavour of the month for a year or so now.

Don’t worry, it’ll be someone else soon, then Coventry can crawl back under their rock. Wonder if Portsmouth might get promoted this year, or Ipswich, it’ll be them next.

 

I can. Muck spreads.

We got eight bookings today. The quality of the ref won’t come into it - we will be fined for failing to control our players and our card marked for future games, expect the rhetoric of us being dirty and niggly to persist.

 

Got to agree with you on this. There's already a bit of notion that we play rough and dirty football and I think that's a huge part of why we get refereed like we do. The officials and opposition teams come thinking that's how we play. Then when the opposition play hard and we have to step up to match it the referee sees it as confirmation of that idea of how we play and we get a game like yesterday where it feels like we're playing against 14, not 11.

 

I couldn’t get to the game yesterday but was it a foul on Morris when he got injured? Robins said after the game we were cynical but we only committed two more fouls than them?

 

I’m more than ok with winning like we did - I think we will develop a “style”.

 

Our fouls were cynical, their's were physical. Morris was injured in a foul that received no punishment.

 

Some of the fouls on Palmer were both cynical and physical.