Bart v Davis

[Huffton]

Seeing as this usually pops up after a bad performance by Kelv, how did people at the game last night think Bart got on? Only seen the goals on SSN and for me he should have saved their goal. How was the rest of his game?

[David Strover]

Apparently every goal we let in seems to be the goalies fault no matter what.

 

I think we are lucky to have two good goalies to be honest. You only have to watch goal highlights on the TV to see 'goalie rickets' virtually every night. It did look like Bart got his positioning and wall a bit 'to cock' but then he apparently made a point blank save later on at 2-1 which I haven't seen.

 

There's no point asking people who went because it just turns into a Kelvin versus Bart competition where each goalie appears to be the best outside the Premier League to the worst within a post!

[Chris Larkin]

He made an excellent save from Leon Clarke in the last ten minutes, and his handling and shot stopping in the rest of the game was mostly decent. Also made two good punches to clear the ball from a corner and cross in. Seemed okay in his control of the defence but didn't have a lot to do as Swindon were really quite poor. I've not seen a replay of the goal; at the time I thought he might have gotten closer to it, although it was well struck.

 

Kicking was weak tonight, for some reason. Almost every goal kick was played short, and the back four insisted on messing about and playing it back to Bart frequently. Maybe it was an Adkins idea to try to keep the ball down all the time? We would have been better just sending it long sometimes. His under pressure distribution was poor at times, with at least one ball going out of bounds when it really didn't need to. The County Ground looked like a small pitch but none of Bart's long kicks went that far up it or hung up in the air very long. I was wondering if he was playing with some sort of leg injury, but I don't see why they'd risk playing him if he had been.

 

For me, Bart tonight was not as good as Kelvin's been in the games I've seen this season. I still think he's a fine keeper though. We've been lucky to have the two of them for so long.

[DT]

I read that as Bette Davis

[The9]

For some reason we started this weird time-wasting short goal kick routine pre-season - it only seems to serve to put the keeper under pressure, although it might be a response to not having the tallest centre-midfielders, thus creating space in the middle of the park for Cork / Hammond to win it without being outjumped by players who instead have pushed forward to press the short kick.

 

Other than that it looks like insanity, forcing the keeper to kick a moving ball in play as opposed to doing the same thing from a dead ball which can't be closed down.