Good result and a decentish performance BUT

Wahy did Clarke change 2 of back 3 ffs. We were doing well and then changed it and looked a bit shakey after
I understand taking Earl off but why then bring Roberts on when he had brought McCarthy on

 

Game in the bag, needs to get minutes into players.
Would you rather bring Roberts on in a game at 1-0 up or in a game 3-0 vs Crawley ? It's a no brainer mate

 

Because it was an ideal opportunity to give Roberts some game time when the game was over

 

Earl just coming back to fitness. Game won 3-0 totally understandable to take him off and give Roberts game time.

Bringing players back gradually should ensure we have them for the rest of the season and reduce the risk of injury. It’s what any competent manager would do.

 

Can't possibly be that, Clarke's a chancer and a clown

 

Played some good stuff but chuff me should have been 7 or 8

 

Watch his post match interview on X. He’ll tell you.

 

Surely you can see he was giving Roberts minutes, we were looking home and hosed and shouldn’t have gave them chances but end of day we won 3 nil. No problem with what Clarke did, it was the players that took eye off ball late on.

 

8-4 to us with the chances we gave up second half

 

Can clearly see he is easing Earl back in and wanted to give Roberts minutes whilst the opportunity was there.

 

Great game management by Clarke (I'm happy to finally say that!). This match came at the perfect time after 3 brutal matches, modest changes to make sure we get the win, then able to afford to rest key players as the win became inevitable. Measured and professional. Brilliant

 

It had it all really good in parts ok in others add in some poor. Anyway 3pts onto the next.

 

3 nill up and we've played a lot of games recently.

 

I've been watching football over 40 years and I've rarely ever seen a manger take two centre halves off when it's not forced on them through injury.

 

it’s quite rare for a team to be 3-0 up and have two centre halves returning from injury.

That may explain why in your 40 years the opportunities have been quite rare.

 

I've seen that before. Usually one of them starts and the other replaces them after 60/70 minutes. What I can't ever remember seeing is replacing one of the returners with a fit centre half, then replacing a fit centre half with one of the returners. I simply do not recall a manager disrupting his defence like that.

 

Didn't seem to cause too many problems as we kept a clean sheet.

 

I suppose it’s made easier when you’re playing three central defenders. Plus it’s only the last few years where you had enough substitutions to be able to risk it.

 

I dread to think what the comments would be like on here from some people, epecially if we'd lost these last four games in a row!!.

 

Tell me you don’t understand the game without telling me you don’t understand the game…

Earl is building fitness back up. He needed taking off after an hour.

Roberts is coming back from injury and needs minutes to build fitness and strength; and he’s not going to play on the left is he?

We were three nil up. They were the correct decisions.

Their chances came initially from a mistake by the other centre half that played the whole game - and they got their heads up from there and forced a couple of saves from Killip.