Quote Originally Posted by thehumblegringo View Post
I don't get your point. Of course you don't get extra points for passes but it's how you open teams up with a bit work on the training ground rather than playing percentages all the time.

Rochdale opened Southend up by moving them out of position and creating holes. Their forward players drifted into pockets in between lines to pull defenders out of position (something incidentally we never ever do) and the speed of the passing ramped up as the opportunity arose.

It may have been against Southend but we didn't create anything remotely similar against Luton B team the other day with a squad that's just been relegated from the premier league.

Everyone who is saying it's against Southend should remember that I'm not highlighting a goal by Fulham or West Brom here but by Rochdale, a team who's budget is probably about 20 times less than ours (at least)
Obviously we see it different, but it looks like extremely poor defending by Southend to me. The passing and movement is good but Southend just seem to walk/drift out of position. If it's all about the work on the training ground why couldn't they replicate it against Blackpool or Shrewsbury?

In any event it's one goal. It's no different to me pulling out a youtube clip of a long punted ball up-field that results in someone like Madrid etc scoring and saying.. 'if it's good enough for Madrid it's gone enough for us'.

I'm sure there are plenty of goals showing Rochdale 'playing the percentages'. There are individual examples of us scoring goals following a number of passes in this thread already, though I appreciate they're not the norm.