After the Blues’ 1-0 away win – the first of this calendar year – against Reading last night, Gary Rowett hailed the performance a perfect away performance.
Experimenting with a new system and a few changes, the Blues struggled to create changes in the first 75 minutes – almost predictably so. Jonathan Grounds is a very solid defender, but sometimes going forward he isn’t the best; leaving him on his own down the left is going to restrict the team. Even with Fabbrini or Shinnie behind two forwards, a lack of width can make it difficult to really hurt teams.
However, defensively, we were fairly solid, and a clean sheet spea ks volumes. Randolph made a few saves, but that’s what he’s in the team for after all. If you can defend solidly for 75 minutes away from home, you can start to hurt teams with fresh legs, which is exactly what the Blues managed to do. Demarai Gray and Lloyd Dyer’s pace started to stretch the game and eventually Donaldson got the important goal.
So was this a blueprint for away success next season, or was this just a lucky break? It could be argued either way. If we can find a way to keep clean sheets, then certainly that must be the priority. When we have players like Thomas, Gray and Dyer who are incredibly quick and dangerous on the counter, if we can keep it tight for 70 minutes, there is likely to be some opportunities to grab a late winner.
However, the danger of this, of course, is if Randolph doesn’t make those saves, or if we make a mistake early on, then there is a problem. When we go 1-0 down away from home, due to the set-up of the team, we are unlikely to get anything out of the game. That being said, I think yesterday’s game has to be the blueprint going forward, even if the 3-5-2 wasn’t massively successful, the pattern of the game was perfect for us. If we are to improve, we need to scrape those sorts of games next year as much as possible.
