by bigmick » Mon Jan 09, 2006 11:20 am
I've never been Pongolle's biggest fan but he was blistering when he came off the bench against Luton. It is a championship defence though, and we are comparing him to strikers and indeed to a team which had the look of being extremely jaded (FWIW i felt this was the game where all our travelling finally caught up with us).
All that said, he did very well and it was his movement for the first goal which really made me sit up and take notice. Three steps backwards to open the door for the pass. Awareness and a football brain, followed by pace and a good finish. I thought that was really top drawer strikers goal and it caused me to conclude that he is a better player than I had given him credit for. The header was a fantastic goal but as I've said in an earlier post, it could've been an instinctive one-off.
Suffice to say that if I was one of the apparantly numerous clubs sniffing around him for between 2 and 3.5 million I'd be getting a little nervous right now. If I was Rafa, I'd start him against Spurs. The lads earned it by keeping us in the FA Cup.
"se e in una bottigla ed e bianco, e latte".