Quote Originally Posted by the other bob wilson View Post
How do you know he wasn’t? It didn’t happen as much in the second half after he’d had fifteen minutes with them.

The problem you and others who are trying to give the players a free pass for Saturday have is that there’s the precedent of the Croatia game to be factored in.just ignoring it won’t work, so let’s go with the theory that the players basically ignored what Page said and turned in one of the best Welsh performances of the last thirty or forty years off their own bats.

The question then arises that, if Croatia was all down to the players, why couldn’t they come up with something similar against an inferior team this weekend?

I’ve said earlier that I’m not a big fan of Page, I think he’s a limited manager at international level, but you can’t just dismiss the Croatia match because you don’t rate him. My own view is that Wales raised their game against a declining opponent and a big factor in that was that they thought Page was being treated unfairly - they were showing their backing for him.

Wales showed against Croatia that they are capable of raising their game to a level which rivals the sides of the Coleman era at times. They’re not as good as those sides, but, equally, they’re not as bad a team as they looked on Saturday. To perform like that in a game with so much riding on it is, I believe, very concerning and there has to be more to the contrast in performances in two games just a month apart (with Johnson fit, we had a stronger squad against Armenia) than the fact the manager isn’t great- questions need to be asked of the players as well.
One of the best performances of the last 30 or 40 years is stretching it by some distance.

YOU are the only one implying the players are not following the managers tactics and going off their own bar so why should we go with that theory?

Page deserves credit for the Croatia victory but he followed it up with same side and gameplan against a team 97th in the world rankings!!! That just goes to show hiow tactically inept he is. Horses for courses and to play just 3 attacking players against Ar-****ing-menia was criminal. Substitutions like for like, hes limited tactically its unbelievable.

In 7 qualification games weve played well once and that was on the back of 6 national league defeats and a World Cup finals where we looked completely out of our depth.

Page is not the man to take this group forward and no amount of you laying all the blame on the players rather than Page will make me think otherwise.