THE MATCHDAY THREAD Discuss ICT & other games in this thread as they happen Inverness CT -V- St Johnstone PREVIEW 24/10/2015 @ 3PM, Caledonian Stadium Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Facebook Go to the Chatroom Media Coverage AUDIO BBC Sportsound Open All Mics [UK Only] TEXT ESPN BBC SKY Sporting Life   VIDEO SPL YouTube Channel ICT Official YouTube Channel   TEAM LINEUPS TO FOLLOW

why can we only fill our bench with four outfield players???

I don't understand why we don't put a couple of the U20 lads onto the bench or even Cameron Mackay.  Surely there's no hard in it and a potential to gain.

Callum Ferguson??? Jason Brown??? (think that's the young defender boy) where are they

Foran, Doran, Warren, Roberts, Brill, Silva, Andrea, Lopez and Draper all hurt

Disappointing end to the match, at least we only dropped a point today as we wouldn't have deserved all 3. The Saints seemed quite happy to sit back and run down the clock for a point so were extremely fortunate to leave with 3 points.

The away team reminded me of Clyde over a decade ago, big solid blokes just happy sitting behind the ball. 

At least Tuesday nights match should suit our style of play far more.

P's can we get the correct players up for the man of the match poll

A very very poor performance all round. We haven't got a leader on the park who can assess play as it happens or in today's case doesn't happen. We are massively predictable. St J could have held us at bay with 8 men today.

Our two front men in the second half made dozens of decent runs but received no service whatsoever.

By the way, what's Hughes problem with Polworth, he was by no means the worse but Hughes looked to be on his case for the whole second half.

Some harsh words spoken on this thread. Emotions obviously running high, not surprising after a mugging like that.

Basically we played Saints off the pitch for the majority of the match and came away with nothing. We could and should have 6 points against them this season, as it is we have 1. That's football sometimes.

The only criticism that I agree with was our inability to translate an extra man and 70% possession into any decent efforts at goal. Our build up play was unnecessarily intricate and long winded. When your opponents are camped in their own half and playing for a draw - they're happy for you to dominate possession and knock the ball around in your own half. Instead of trying to score the perfect goal we should have shown much more urgency and directness. The more balls you play into the box, even bad ones, the better odds of one finally breaking your way and ending up in the net. As it was, we never asked any questions of an underperforming Saints defence. Ironically, the closest we came was from a long ball over the top to Story, who easily outpaced Shaughnessy and Anderson only to lob over the bar.  

It may have been 69% possession but that's no good when we barely get out of our own half. The performance today probably knocked 5-600 of our attendance on Tuesday. I heard lots of folk on the way out saying they will watch it on tv rather than waste £20. 

Basically we played Saints off the pitch for the majority of the match and came away with nothing.

Knocking the ball about sideways across the halfway line does not equate to playing a team off the park.

Just an awful, awful performance from ICT. Lots of the ball, lots of sideways passes 30 - 40 yards from goal but with absolutely no cutting edge against a Saints side that got men behind the ball and challenged us to break them down knowing full well that we didn't have the guile to do it. I don't think anything happened in the first half. Missed the sending off at the start of the second and the longer the game went on without ICT making the man advantage count the more you could see Saints sneaking something with a last minute winner. No idea if the penalty award was fair or not. Devine seemed to make a complete arse of things and as soon as he started struggling you could sense something big was going to happen - a bit like Tremarco in the SCF against Falkirk. 

I'm struggling to think of a worse ICT performance under Hughes. Apparently we had something like 70% possession. I bet about 0.0000001% of that we actually did anything of note. I can barely remember an attack of any sort from us and as for a save from Mannus? I don't even think we managed that. Even with a man advantage it was Saint Johnstone who looked more likely to score on a counter. We simply couldn't create anything of note.

Seems to be a few off the field issues affecting things just now and that certainly appears to be translating into some very sub par performances on the pitch. The sooner the uncertainty about the manager is resolved the better.

 

Looking at the SPL online site and the distribution of play between the teams where we had, allegedly, far more  possession.What is happening?

Has the departure of all the leading players drained the teams' emotional banks? Not criticising, just querying?

 

 

Watching paint dry would have been more entertaining.....best sort themselves out for tuesday

Disappointing end to the match, at least we only dropped a point today as we wouldn't have deserved all 3. The Saints seemed quite happy to sit back and run down the clock for a point so were extremely fortunate to leave with 3 points.

The away team reminded me of Clyde over a decade ago, big solid blokes just happy sitting behind the ball. 

At least Tuesday nights match should suit our style of play far more.

P's can we get the correct players up for the man of the match poll

We lost. It's 3 points dropped.

Disappointing end to the match, at least we only dropped a point today as we wouldn't have deserved all 3. The Saints seemed quite happy to sit back and run down the clock for a point so were extremely fortunate to leave with 3 points.

The away team reminded me of Clyde over a decade ago, big solid blokes just happy sitting behind the ball. 

At least Tuesday nights match should suit our style of play far more.

P's can we get the correct players up for the man of the match poll

We lost. It's 3 points dropped.

I thought it looked very much like a draw tbh. With neither side being able to break down the other. We did have a greater desire to want to win the match but just couldnt pass it through them. It was 0-0 till near the end which in my book means a point each is on the cards, If we were winning 1-0 with a few mins to go and lose 2-1, I would call that dropping 3 points. Or perhaps having numerous attempts saved and being worth of a victory. A point each would have been fair.

Hope you enjoyed your Baxters soup. :-)

I would imagine the faith will be fully restored by Tuesday night. 

Overall a s#it weekend for me football-wise....losing to a last minute penalty is real gutting, but from comments on here it looks like we were pretty poor.....strange how we can have three good wins on the trot and then two poor performances. Thats football I guess!

A Disco Tent....... Now that's entertaining !!!!!!'

Very poor throughout the team, no creativity shown by anyone. Not great to take the advantage over 10 men either, we got what that performance deserved - nothing.

Hopefully we can't be as bad on Tuesday and 1 or 2 injuries have healed up.

I think yesterday's views were clouded by a last minute penalty, the first half we actually played not bad at all but so did the Saints, After watching them pull apart Rangers so easily in a Cup match, I thought defensively we did well and the game was pretty open. The ref was more interested in letting the game flow and freekicks were few and far between.

The second half was totally different, with the early sending off you would assume we could go on and win the match but all the Perth side did was to leave one man up front and the rest of them camped inside their own half and rarely came out of it, add to that extremely slow substitutions and booting the ball out of sight for throw ins to run down the clock. If we had 70% possession over the 90 minutes, then we would have had 55% in the first half and 85% in the second.

Tuesday night TV or go to the match?

I'm opting for real live football, Its far better than the TV and theres even a deal on for under 16s to get in for free.  With a 7:05pm ko time it's certainly doable on a school night.

Poor performance all round I thought. Passing was woeful at times and we had no ideas or creativity going forward. StJ did a great defending job when they went down to ten men. Nobody deserved to win this game.  

Neither team deserved to win the game and the first half was terrible from both sides, it was an ugly game of football to watch. SJ came for the draw with their play and will be delighted with all 3 points, we simply didn't create anything that would give us that opportunity. We had so much of the ball in the second half but as someone stated earlier we couldn't even get the ball into any dangerous area's that might at the very least create a mistake from the away side, also how often was Tremarco on his own out wide in the second and how many balls did he send into the box? Apart from Storey's run through on goal to blast high and wide, we had no alternative plan other than to pass straight through their entire team.

Thought Fisher's behaviour was poor.

There was a spell in the second half for about 5 or 10 minutes where so many passes went out or to the opposition(from both sides) it was like watching a sunday league game. At no time did I feel we would get the 3 points.

Edited October 25, 20159 yr by LundavraJag

I think yesterday's views were clouded by a last minute penalty, the first half we actually played not bad at all but so did the Saints, After watching them pull apart Rangers so easily in a Cup match, I thought defensively we did well and the game was pretty open. The ref was more interested in letting the game flow and freekicks were few and far between.

The second half was totally different, with the early sending off you would assume we could go on and win the match but all the Perth side did was to leave one man up front and the rest of them camped inside their own half and rarely came out of it, add to that extremely slow substitutions and booting the ball out of sight for throw ins to run down the clock. If we had 70% possession over the 90 minutes, then we would have had 55% in the first half and 85% in the second.

Tuesday night TV or go to the match?

I'm opting for real live football, Its far better than the TV and theres even a deal on for under 16s to get in for free.  With a 7:05pm ko time it's certainly doable on a school night.

I think yesterdays views are based on the fact that yet again we created so few chances in another game. People can bleat on about possession as much as they like but possession means nothing if you do nothing creative or incisive as we did yesterday. One chance is sometimes all you need to win the game. Saints got a chance took it and walked off with three points. For all the time we had the ball we apparently mustered up 2 shots on goal and half of the game was against ten men. You can't dress that up as anything other than poor from ICT and and really solid defensive display from Saint Johnstone.

Where's dougal gone?

I hear that he has been made redundant.

I would go as far as to suggest that Yogi's future depends on a positive outcome on the evening of 27/10/15. 

While a pretty poor game to watch, we were better in the first half and played any football that was played. Sending off changed the game as St Johnstone just sat in and said break us down. We couldn't do that and got caught with a possibly soft penalty (would need to see again to be sure).

A lot of negativity from posters but it has to be remembered that we have so many players missing that it has been hard to get a settled team or options to change things when things are not going well as was the case yesterday. Even when Hughes put Vigurs on, he was simply dreadful with his passing which was pretty poor from a lot of players yesterday. Don't agree with Renegade about putting players on the bench just to fill places though, it does nothing for their development to my mind.

The injury crisis is proving some things however about our squad (and I realise this is only my opinion) but to me, Devine is proving a disappointment. His passing is poor, often under no pressure, he gets pulled out of position too easily and seems to lose concentration too easily. Polworth is another whose passing is poor, tackling is almost non existent and just appears to be lost at times. Was very surprised Williams was substituted ahead of Polworth.

Until we get some players back, we are to easy to play against at times and teams are sussing this out.

Finally, a word on the referee. Sure he didn't cost us the game but I thought he was really poor. Cannot comment on the ordering off as on the other side of the park but Mackay took an age to walk and was shouting abuse including swearing at the fourth official, their number 9 was constantly swearing and shouting at the referee but despite numerous warnings from the ref was not booked. Meekings booking was a joke and he missed some blatant fouls against us. To me he looked out of his depth. Have we any good referees left in Scotland!.

 

An interesting statistic from this weekend: We had more possession against St J than Celtic had against Dundee United, only they created over 20 chances and scored 5. Statistically, we apparently created 8 (although I can only really remember 2 or 3) and scored none. Statistics can always be misleading, but this one is not: Having the ball is an important aspect of the game, but using it effectively is much more important. Likewise, this is an entertainment business and what we saw on Saturday was anything but entertaining. Injuries are a major issue without question, but a massive improvement is required for Tuesday...and more importantly, for league business on Saturday.

Worst game of football I have ever seen. Thank you.