What a frantic way to end the game… Down at the Vitality it finished 2-2, end to end for the last ten or fifteen minutes, the sort of finish where anything could have happened and very nearly did. Bournemouth rattled the post deep into injury time and both sets of players looked out on their feet. By the final whistle half the away end wasn’t sure whether to celebrate or collapse to be honest. Here’s what we took from it on the walk back to the coaches, cars and trains back to West London.
We rode our luck, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. Bournemouth blazed over the bar at least twice when they really should have hurt us, had a couple of clear sights of goal in the first half that should have gone in, while the referee was poor again for large parts of it, though he more or less redeemed himself by booking four or five of their players for hauling ours back all afternoon. Take the point and don’t ask too many questions – that was the mood leaving the stadium, and it’s hard to argue with that. Even Keith Andrews wasn’t pretending it was a vintage performance afterwards: “Our games are rarely boring. We did not hit the levels we set for ourselves; we did not make life easy for ourselves.”
In truth, most of us would have snapped your hand off for a point before kick-off because we know Bournemouth are a good side, excellent in patches, and there’s a growing feeling around the ground that they’ll do well in Europe this season. A draw here, unbeaten and against a team many reckon will finish comfortably mid-table or better, is no disgrace whatsoever. It just doesn’t always feel like it when you’ve watched your own side give the ball away in dangerous areas as often as we did.
Yannick Schuster is the real deal. Thrown into the deep end for the second game running, he was excellent – “he wasn’t a boy today, he was a man,” as one Bee put it on the way out. He’s still raw in one or two moments, caught out of position at the back a couple of times, but for someone his age coming straight into a Premier League side and performing the way he has, it’s an enormous credit to him. Give it time and the positioning sorts itself out. The composure clearly isn’t a problem and you can see why the powers that be have so much faith and confidence in the defender.
Schade’s second was a superb finish, even if the opportunity was gifted to him by a Bournemouth goalkeeper who essentially passed it straight to our man. Marco Rose could hardly argue with how his side reacted to the howler: “It is about how we react. We are a team, we do mistakes together. Even at 2-2, I think we can win the game.” What was missing for large chunks, though, was any real creativity through the middle. The buffed-up Yarmoliuk was a man-machine in there, doing the unglamorous graft, and providing the cross for Schade’s opener. But there wasn’t a proper ‘creativity’ until Damsgaard came off the bench. It took him a while to find his range – some of those early passes went wildly astray – but we took huge risks in the final stages.
Ajer at centre-back deserves a mention too – he had one of the best World Cups of anyone in the squad and has grown in confidence. Vitaly ran himself into the ground yet again – chasing shadows for large parts of the second half. The Dango-or-Anthony conundrum rumbles on unresolved; both did okay today without either grabbing the game by the scruff of the neck, and Keith Andrews shuffled the pack once more, much as he did last week.
The honest verdict, shared by pretty much everyone leaving the Vitality, is that a draw was a good result – Bournemouth caused us real problems, especially down our left with their pair working that channel, and we still make too many unforced errors, giving the ball away in space when the simple pass was on. Cut that out, add a bit more composure in the final third, and we’ll be the real deal.
Still, unbeaten is unbeaten, and there’s no time to dwell on it anyway. It’s Reading away on Tuesday for what promises to be a serious knees-up with five thousand of us heading West, then back to the Gtech under the lights on Friday for Chelsea.
Dave Lane
