The Lounge

[Colum]

Admittedly I wasn’t at the game, and only saw the highlights, but I really don’t think we can complain about Jimmy’s sending off. Yes it was harsh, but it is one of those that you give the referee the option to make up his mind. Once you do that, if it goes against you, you shouldn’t be surprised. It was two footed, with the studs showing. End of!

[Windlesham Don]

Spot on, Colum. Some refs would have given a yellow, but we don’t have a leg to stand on appeal-wise (if you’ll pardon the expression).

A stupid red, and one which leaves us without a ball-winning midfielder for the next three games.

Fortunately for me I am away on holiday for the next three games and I won’t even bother trying to use iFollow when abroad!

Curiously, I couldn’t get commentary on Saturday and have lost access to the highlights. It seems that my annual subscription may have run out, but they didn’t even send me a reminder to re-subscribe! I also went onto their online chat when I couldn’t get any commentary – they took my email address and went through the normal emptying of cache/cookies etc. but obviously didn’t even check my subscription!!

EFL – p*ss up and brewery come to mind…

[Colum]

It will be interesting to see where Deano figures (if at all) in the next three games.

[Colum]

That result sucks. Many will blame the referee, but he set his stall out early with some very soft decisions. Pompey played into this, and we gave him every opportunity to give decisions against us. We just weren’t savvy enough.

On another day we could have won that first half. Deano was restored to the starting lineup, and did more than a good job going forward. In fact pretty much everything good offensively came through him.

Then a moment of utter madness from Barry Fuller. People may moan about the decision, but for me it was a stonewall penalty. He was caught out of position, put two hands in the centre of the forward’s back. As I said about last week’s sending off, if you give refs a decision to make, you can’t feel too hard done by if he makes them.

After that they got their tails up and we lost our shape. The only laughable moments from the ref were late in the second half. Robbo got a elbow in the face that went unpunished. It should have been a yellow at least. Then Kennedy was poleaxed in injury time. With the game stopped and poor Callum still be attended to, he blew for half time. It looked bad. I just hope he’s OK.

In the second half we gave another awful goal away. A miss kick, a good save by the keeper, but no one following in on the rebound. After that it was the predictable hoof forward to a goal poacher who is not going to score from a 40 yard punt to the edge of the opposition’s area when he has his back to goal.

We threw on young Hartigan and Forrester. Both did OK under the circumstances, but it wasn’t enough. Then we had to play the final 10 minutes with 10 men after another blow to the head to Robbo. The poor guy was put through the mill today.

For me the problem seems to be that we’re a disjointed team. Our front two don’t seem to fit our high tempo game. Cody strength isn’t running 40 yards to get a ball. Appiah doesn’t seem to get his positioning right a lot of the time, and ends up moaning to the referee. Midfield is OK, but we don’t seem to link up well with the forward line.

Defence is where I really think we have issues. I hate saying this, but I really can’t see Robbo and Fuller being kept on next season. Neither seem 100% comfortable with the change of playing style, and both have made bad mistakes so far this season. There’s even a growing call from the fans for Fuller to be dropped and playing Frankham instead. That’s a hard decision, but one that has merit.

So we move on to Gillingham on Tuesday. This has become a must win game. I’ll take an ugly 1-0 win at the moment, but if we lose that one, the calls for Ardley’s head on a platter can’t be too far away. Personally I’d give him more time, but he must know he has to improve things if he is to be our manager for much longer.

[Devon Womble]

So, I finally get ifollow to work…They have not only sorted out the “am I logged in, am I not?” problem, but also appear to have fixed their jittery streaming. Yet for all this, what I watched for 90 minutes left me wishing the ref had blown for full time after 70 minutes… if for no other reason than to ensure it would prevent him from encouraging the Pompey Gorillas to maim any more of our players unpunished, or complete any more free kick winning prat falls in front of him.

That said, with my view from the lofty ifollow camera position, we never looked likely to win the game.
Pompey were bigger, faster, and smarter than we were from the start. So dominant was their game that I have to give some credit to the way we kept them at bay for so long. But, as Colum says, we simply spent too much time hoofing the ball around in the hope that Elliot or the Beast would pop up to save us.
As for individual performances, I was not so sure of Parrett’s performance… he appeared to miss a howler when front and centre of goal… certainly this was what the home crowd thought too. From then on he, like most of the team, simply didn’t connect. Many of the newbies in fact simply didn’t even look like they broke into a sweat. I though in fact that Nightingale and Francomb were the only ones with a sense of urgency about them. Barcham, rightly substituted, was in constant danger of being snuffed out by the uruk hai of Portsmouth’s defence, while Appiah and McDonald seemed to take a more ‘tippy tappy’ approach. Long of course also stood out and can hardly be blamed for either goal. His reading of the far post banana shot free kick was sublime.

In summary, it comes to something when the highlight of the game was the desperate attempts by the evidently rain-sodden cameraman to try and fend of the raindrops from the camera lens… It was a good enough performance to leave me wondering if Hurricane Irma was in fact heading for Wimbledon and not me… Perhaps though, a Hurricane is what Wimbledon sadly need right now.

[martindownunderdon]

Hi all. Devon womble its funny it was the first time I had a very good picture with ifollow,maybe we should ask them to fix our team. To me Forrester looks like he has some class,but as for our forwards they were in Portsmouth back pocket the whole game. They ran and past quicker and better than us and there wingers got behind our defense at will lucky they needed us to help them score. Overall not a good day at the office. COYD

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