It’s another big cup weekend, and a chance to spend some time scratching our heads about our away form.
That might sound like an odd thing to say when we’re playing an away match, but taking a Championship side on away from home is very different from the week-in, week-out grind of league matches away from home.
Richard Sutcliffe revealed last weekend that, remarkably, we out-perform our xG at home more than any team in the top 4 divisions of the pyramid, but under-perform our xG away from home more than anyone in the top 4 tiers.
Our away form isn’t awful, and nobody should forget the excellent performances we’ve already put in at Notts County, Shrewsbury, Crewe and twice at Mansfield.
However, there is clearly an imbalance – I certainly wouldn’t go as far as to call it an issue – which needs to be addressed.
The Blackburn match doesn’t feel like it belongs in this conversation though. As I said above, we’ve tended to perform when visiting big teams for high consequence matches. Obviously,, to fully accept that statement you have to imagine stockport never happened, but I think we’d all be happy to do that!
We can go back to last season and reference our performances at Coventry and Sheffield United as further proof that we enjoy these sort of challenges.
Higher divisions sides aren’t going to risk the embarrassment of being accused of defensiveness when entertaining a lower division side on their own patch, even when that lower division side clearly has the quality to hurt them. This means they’re bound, on occasion, to leave gaps which we can exploit, on the break at least.
We have the quality on the ball to control some phases of play too, and are less likely to face the in-your-face kick-and-rush approach which served Newport County and Accrington Stanley so well against us. Given space to play, I’d expect George Evans, Andy Cannon and Elliot Lee to create chances.
It’s far too optimistic to hanker back to the good old days of higher division sides not bothering to look into lowly opposition because they simply backed themselves to be better. The upset we sprung on Middlesbrough at the turn of the Millennium was an example of this: surely, if Bryan Robson and his staff had looking into how were playing they’d have used man-mountains like Gary Pallister and Brian Deane to crowd our diminutive keeper, Kevin Dearden, at set pieces, and tell dead ball specialist Christian Ziege to rip the ball into the goalmouth.
Instead they were just about the only side that season which didn’t cause us problems from set pieces, despite having remarkable weapons at their disposal for such situations.
Instead, Robson seemed to assume that a side containing Paul Gascoigne, Juninho, Paul Ince and more would simply blow us away. They didn’t and the rest is history.
Blackburn won’t do us the disrespect of setting out like that. Football has moved on, and they’ll know our approach inside-out, as we will know theirs. That sets up an intriguing battle, and whether it takes place home or away really makes no difference.
DragonHeart 