At 2-0 and 3-1 down, 3-2 going into injury time, few would have expected us to get anything from Leeds yesterday but we managed to fight back to secure a point in a 3-3 Christmas cracker at Elland Road.
Steve Cotterill paid tribute to the spirit that we showed and was delighted, as you would expected, to get this point: ‘it was an unbelievable game – two good teams and a great game of football.
‘We’ve had players sidelined for different reasons but the spirit among the lads here is incredible. I’m proud of my lads to have come out of this game with something.’
Those words, something that we have heard countless times from a previous manager, finally did come from Cotterill – ‘bare bones’, which he feels made the point all the more special: ‘we`re down to the bare bones but we still managed to get a point and I’m delighted with every single one of my players.’
We were 2-0 down in the opening 10 minutes and he feels that it took us at least 20 to get going, although we should have gone ahead before Leeds did.
Cotterill believes, as I think his Leeds counterpart Simon Grayson also did, that the officials did not have the best of games. He feels that this did not help us at times: ‘we didn’t get going for the first 20 minutes but after that we got hold of the game. A draw was probably a fair result, but we could have won it at the end.
‘The first goal didn’t set us off on a good note. We should have had a corner when Kasper Schmeichel saved from John Utaka, but the referee did not gave a corner and 48 seconds later the ball was in the back of our net.
‘I know we had an opportunity to defend against them for their goal, but it was our corner.
‘We got the rough end of the stick from some refereeing decisions early on but I felt he evened it up in the second half and we got a few decisions.’
A man in good goalscoring form of late in Dave Nugent, who notched his 3rd in 4 games, with him scoring what Cotterill thinks was his best so far – one that no keeper would have saved: ‘Nuge has scored some good goals for us, but that was the cleanest strike I’ve seen from him. No goalkeeper saves that.’
Well if Cotterill thinks that going into Leeds we were down to the ‘bare bones’ then Watford could be even worse, although to be fair I think that his usage of this phrase is most definitely more well placed than it was one of his predecessors at Fratton!
Before the game I would have happily taken a point, so I am more than happy to get this following it – Watford away on Saturday will be an equally as tough game but again I cannot see why we cannot give them a game and, hopefully, take another point…
PLAY UP POMPEY!
