Conceding goals

[Millsy]

I don't want this to be taken as an attack on specific players, just discussing facts.

Genuine question.

How often since our initial run have we had a game where we have conceded and it has NOT been down to one of the following:

- Rafael making a cockup
- Esteves poor defending
- losing the ball passing it around the back
- Rafael conceding from a long shot

??

Homework for the opposition must be easy given the above:

Press high, pressure all defenders, take shots from outside the box.

Even lowly Luton, easily and repeatedly the worst team I've seen us play knew what to do to get a goal and worry us.

[From Despair To Where?]

I suspect its a combination of key players being injured, players playing out of position, taking more risks when chasing a game and in the case of Rafael, a loss of concentration.

[Hound]

Have many of the goals genuinely been Esteves fault? Stoke yeah. Not too sure on many others. Maybe Bournemouth but he wasn’t exactly helped out there

Agree on long shots, no doubt that is part of the opposition tactics

[Zip]

Some interesting stuff on the Planet Swans website. There are stats about us and Swansea which show both teams are very similar in both defence and attack. It makes reference to how strong or weak we are at certain aspects, eg very strong on counter attacks and set pieces but very weak with shots from distance at our goal.

So opposition teams are fully aware of our strengths and weaknesses.

[Jagermesiter1871]

Definitely does feel like Rafael lets in basically every shot from distance. Is this potentially due to Rino/Laurent not closing down? Or is it purely some massive weakness of his?

[Zip]

Definitely does feel like Rafael lets in basically every shot from distance. Is this potentially due to Rino/Laurent not closing down? Or is it purely some massive weakness of his?

His weakness. He should have done better with some of the shots.

[Lower West]

Teams collectively defend. Far too often we've passengers in the team. Other players as a consequence get pulled out of position.

[Orion1871]

Just do what Ian does and blame Ovie for everything.

[Snowflake Royal]

Have many of the goals genuinely been Esteves fault? Stoke yeah. Not too sure on many others. Maybe Bournemouth but he wasn’t exactly helped out there

Agree on long shots, no doubt that is part of the opposition tactics

About three from memory, but I'd have to look through all the goals to pinpoint which ones. Worth remembering goals are frequently not down to a single error but multiple contributions, so I'm not saying three total clangers where he was solely to blame.

[royalp-we]

Rafael has saved us plenty of points. Some of his saves have been world class. Passing out has been nail biting but we play out from defence successfully on many occasions each game. It all goes unnoticed. A few howlers from distance doesn’t make a bad keeper, or reason to drop our senior GK.

The analysis should be on the referees - if we had correct calls given there’s no stats needed to prove we’d be up and around Norwich in the table right now.

Rino and Laurent and others are just as culpable for not stopping shots imo. We’ve been blessed with incredible keepers over the years, I truly think Rafael is one of them. We could do so much worse than have him here and his communication with the likes of Morro and Moore this season has been potentially one of the most solid in the division.

I’m rambling but the weekly berating of Rafael on both here and other platforms is laughable. I think the reason we’ve conceded goals is due to a few things, injuries, lapses from the defenders. Some of the tweets I’ve seen toward the man from our own fans for his religious beliefs have been a joke too. We should be thankful there’s such a player, who’s saved our arses from point blank, at this club.

[Snowball]

In the first eight games, remember "Rope a Dope"?

We barely tried to play for the first 30 minutes every game and the other side
had lots of possession, but league sides weren't scoring.

Back then (IMO) Laurent and Rhino played more defensively, just filled the spaces.
Other sides found it almost impossible to break us down.

They effectively couldn't attack through the middle so had to go for wing-play
and crosses, which our two CBs gobbled up.

We conceded early against Colchester and made them look good, for example.

We DID concede lots of "shots" but Moore, in particular kept getting blocks in.
The blocks don't go into the stats as shots, and obviously not shots-on-target but they are, really.



But pundits, fans, and, I think, Pauno himself, read that we had a ridiculously-good xG
that couldn't possibly be maintained. Pauno actually said we needed to express ourselves more

We started to allow Rhino and Laurent forward. We left more gaps. Moore had more space to cover
and now shots he was previously blocking were now not-quite-blocked and were exposing Gabriel.

If you look at a lot of our conceded goals, they were "almost-blocked" or "almost" cut-out, fine-margins etc

But I think the major "problem" is allowing Rhino and Laurent to express themselves.

I think we could have bored ourselves to top spot and stayed there with the tactics
we had for games 1-8, though I remember saying that we would at some point concede
some first-half goals and could be 3-0 down at HT against sides who took their chances.

[Nameless]

The analysis should be on the referees - if we had correct calls given there’s no stats needed to prove we’d be up and around Norwich in the table right now.
.

Well we’d only have got 1 point from the Luton game...
And there have been other instances where opposition managers/ fans have been convinced refs have made errors that went in our favour.
I prefer Pauno’s take that you ignore reffing decisions - they will ALWAYS give calls you don’t agree with and you forget the ones that benefit you.

[Snowflake Royal]

Not sure I remember many world class saves from Rafael at all.

He's made some good ones, a handful of great ones, but he's been pretty poor on at least half a dozen.

Look at how he did last season by contrast. Very very few mistakes and he was certainly saving more of the efforts we've seen him let in.

Maybe he's having a bad half season and can recover, but approaching 31 (young for a keeper I know) and with very few appearances over the last ten years before coming here, and with a quality young home grown keeper in the wings, we should be seriously looking at transition and succession plans the way he's playing right now.

Well worth giving him a two / three game break to work on his issues and test out Southwood in the Championship. If Southwood excels, then great, if not Cabral comes back in with a kick up the arse.

[royalp-we]

Southwood is an unknown - his time will come - maybe we will see him in the Cup fixture - but it’s a crazy suggestion to start him in a league fixture in place of a former Brazil international, 30yr old supercoppa winner just yet.

He’s definitely made some world class saves this season, saved penalties and has an impressive 21 clean sheets from about 60 games - not bad at all considering how poor we were at times last season.

We started this year with Rafael saving our backsides at Fulham with one of the best goalkeeping performances I’ve ever seen. To drop him for an untested Southwood would be like the time we threw Virginia in to the first team at this level.

[Zip]

Can’t agree. Rafael has been responsible for more howlers and kept his place than any Reading keeper I can remember in a long while.
He should have saved the shot v Luton. He made an awful mistake v Brentford with a shot straight at him. Got dispossessed v Bournemouth from which they scored. Let in a couple v Coventry he should have saved. At fault for an awful clearance straight to an opposition player....was it Stoke or Preston? I can’t recall but that led to another goal. His distribution is awful.

Time for change.

[Nameless]

Can anyone give me a rough idea of the number of minutes of football Southwood has played this season ?

[bcubed]

In the first eight games, remember "Rope a Dope"?

We barely tried to play for the first 30 minutes every game and the other side
had lots of possession, but league sides weren't scoring.

Back then (IMO) Laurent and Rhino played more defensively, just filled the spaces.
Other sides found it almost impossible to break us down.

They effectively couldn't attack through the middle so had to go for wing-play
and crosses, which our two CBs gobbled up.

We conceded early against Colchester and made them look good, for example.

We DID concede lots of "shots" but Moore, in particular kept getting blocks in.
The blocks don't go into the stats as shots, and obviously not shots-on-target but they are, really.



But pundits, fans, and, I think, Pauno himself, read that we had a ridiculously-good xG
that couldn't possibly be maintained. Pauno actually said we needed to express ourselves more

We started to allow Rhino and Laurent forward. We left more gaps. Moore had more space to cover
and now shots he was previously blocking were now not-quite-blocked and were exposing Gabriel.

If you look at a lot of our conceded goals, they were "almost-blocked" or "almost" cut-out, fine-margins etc

But I think the major "problem" is allowing Rhino and Laurent to express themselves.

I think we could have bored ourselves to top spot and stayed there with the tactics
we had for games 1-8, though I remember saying that we would at some point concede
some first-half goals and could be 3-0 down at HT against sides who took their chances.

Could be something in that. We were definitely more defensive minded and boring early on. But as you suggest, it wasn’t sustainable at either end. At some point we weren’t going to manage to block every shot and at some point we weren’t going to be able to continue to score from every chance .

So he had to make a change. And it might have been a conscious decision to get Rino and Laurent playing in a more attacking way. Or they and other players may have just grown in confidence as the wins piled up. But staying as we were was never going to have been an option.

[SCIAG]

Southwood is an unknown - his time will come - maybe we will see him in the Cup fixture - but it’s a crazy suggestion to start him in a league fixture in place of a former Brazil international, 30yr old supercoppa winner just yet.

He’s definitely made some world class saves this season, saved penalties and has an impressive 21 clean sheets from about 60 games - not bad at all considering how poor we were at times last season.

We started this year with Rafael saving our backsides at Fulham with one of the best goalkeeping performances I’ve ever seen. To drop him for an untested Southwood would be like the time we threw Virginia in to the first team at this level.

I appreciate what you’re saying and there’s certainly some sense in it, but it’s also pretty close to saying that you should never pick an inexperienced goalkeeper at all. Everyone has to start somewhere.

Southwood is 23 and has played 86 first team matches including 15 in the SPL. Virginia was 19 and had never played. World of difference.

[Orion1871]

Might as well give Southwood a go against Swansea. With our record against them we could have Oblak in goal and we'd still lose.

[royalp-we]

Southwood is an unknown - his time will come - maybe we will see him in the Cup fixture - but it’s a crazy suggestion to start him in a league fixture in place of a former Brazil international, 30yr old supercoppa winner just yet.

He’s definitely made some world class saves this season, saved penalties and has an impressive 21 clean sheets from about 60 games - not bad at all considering how poor we were at times last season.

We started this year with Rafael saving our backsides at Fulham with one of the best goalkeeping performances I’ve ever seen. To drop him for an untested Southwood would be like the time we threw Virginia in to the first team at this level.

I appreciate what you’re saying and there’s certainly some sense in it, but it’s also pretty close to saying that you should never pick an inexperienced goalkeeper at all. Everyone has to start somewhere.

Southwood is 23 and has played 86 first team matches including 15 in the SPL. Virginia was 19 and had never played. World of difference.

I appreciate that. It is a different situation to the Virginia one (another crazy idea by Gomes there). Just feel that maybe we should start Southwood in the Cup, integrate him in pre season perhaps, but the Championship is different gravy to National League South and about on a level with SPL. Admittedly I’ve only watched the the 2 cup fixtures this season but he didn’t strike me as a commanding GK.

If we go by first team matches played then looking at the 15 clean sheets Southwood has kept so far, against poorer opposition; along with the Colchester and Luton performances to me it doesn’t suggest he’s going to be better any than Cabral.