Total Pageviews

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Leicester 1 Charlton 1

So, what have Paddy McCarthy and Paolo Di Canio have in common? Well, not a awful lot except for the ability to score late equalisers at Leicester. Just over 4 long years ago it was Paolo Di Canio, in our best season in the Prem, scoring the equaliser with an 84th minute penalty in a 1-1 draw and this time round it was the reborn McCarthy doing the same to retain our unbeaten run at the oddly named Crisp Bowl.
Annoyingly, there's nothing in the Telegraph or Observer this morning so the next place to look is the posh_murdoch and there's our first report complete with their player scores. Apparently "doing it all the time in training,” Paddy McCarthy not only proved to be the MOM with "a rousing performance" but scored the late, late equaliser with an overhead kick into the bottom corner in the 89th minute.
Painfully, whilst musing on Palarse's 12 game unbeaten run, its perhaps not pleasant to read "it was an equaliser the promotion chasers just about deserved, having been stretched for most of the second half ."
And on a day that saw the first appearance of Moutaouakil for years, well Southampton actually, the independent also turned up for the first in ages and tells us that "but for a shot by Matt Holland that flashed narrowly wide, Alan Pardew's team had not looked like scoring, even though for the first half they dominated possession."
And a quick look at the stats in the sportinglife tells you all you need to know about our wayward shooting as we attempt to regain the title of worst shots in the fizzies (which we have done...) with a pathetic total of 6 shots off-target but it does at least show that our main attribute was in efficiency as the one goal scored was from our only attempt that was on target...
So it's perhaps not surprising then that Pards laments that there was a bit of magic missing in an ugly game but will surely upset a few people by saying "We tried to change it at half-time but we are lacking some real technical players like Darren Ambrose, Svetoslav Todorov and Andy Reid," and then rubbed salt in the wound by adding "I'm hoping to have Ambrose available for Tuesday, and when the window opens I may have to bring in a player to improve us in that area."
He also confirmed that "we had quite a lot of the ball but we couldn't hurt them in the final third of the pitch." And for the third game running, and its getting a bit monotonous now, "we showed character ( and grit) and dug in and got a point in the end."
And if you're desperate for more, then the opposition can provide it and it confirms what Pardew had previously hinted, by saying that Big Chris "was lucky to stay on the pitch in the 12th minute when he was booked after catching Stearman in the face with a loose elbow."
Charlton: Weaver; Bougherra, McCarthy, Fortune (Moutaouakil 65), Powell; Varney, Semedo (Sam 80), Holland, Zheng, J Thomas; Iwelumo.
Subs (not used): Randolph, Racon, McLeod.
Goals: McCarthy 90
Booked: Iwelumo 13 (foul on Stearman)

No comments: