Match Report
I went along to Loftus Road this afternoon to see us play Brentford in the last friendly of the season. Predictably, we lost, but after the Bees scored in the first couple of minutes, we managed not to concede again, with Joe Walsh pulling off a number of good saves. We never looked like equalising, mainly because we played without a striker. Michael Frey and Rayan Kolli are both injured and Zan Celar was unavailable because his wife was giving birth to their second child. Ruman Burrell, the latest addition to our front line, was on the bench, but disappointingly didn’t get a run out.
Presumably, the starting line-up was quite close to what it will be in our first league game of the season next Saturday against Preston North End. Joe Walsh was in goal; Jimmy Dunne (at right back), Liam Morrison, Steve Cook and Ziyad Larkeche (at left back) were in defence; Sam Field and Nicholas Madsen were the defensive midfield; and our front four were Ilias Chair, Keiran Morgan, Karamoko Dembélé and Kwame Poku, with no one playing as a striker.
The Bees were quicker out of the blocks than us and the sustained spell of early pressure, in which we barely got a touch, paid off with a goal in less than two minutes. It came from the second of two long throws on the left, not a tactic you associate with a Premier League team, but one that proved effective nevertheless. After that, our defending improved, although Larkeche proved a bit of a liability and Cook was guilty of one mistake when he was wrong-footed by a quick pass out from the back, leading to a low strike into the bottom left-hand corner that Walsh did well to save.
In the first half it was hard to see what difference our new head coach was making, with the team looking remarkably like it did last season, more inclined to pass the ball from side to side around the halfway line – or backwards – than move it up the pitch. For the first 45 minutes, we had no shots on target and an xG of 0.09. It wasn’t the fast, attacking football I was expecting from a Julien Stéphan team and which we’d shown flashes of in pre-season. It was the usual slop.
Things improved a little in the second half, largely as a result of the substitution of Cook and Dunne with our two new Australian arrivals, Kealey Adamson and Jaylan Pearman. Pearman showed a bit of attacking intent, although he was muscled off the ball a bit too easily by Brentford’s big lads, while Adamson looked really comfortable at right back, suggesting Dunne could return to a centre back role in future. He was good at holding on to the ball, too, and made some really good runs – he was the biggest positive of the match for my money and looked like he could become a regular starter.
The only other newcomer we got a look at was Poku, who had a couple of good moments, but didn’t seem like a Paul Smyth upgrade. (Smyth was absent from the bench.) To be fair, he was up against some solid, Premier League defenders, so may fare better against Championship opponents.
Later substitutions of Jonathan Varane for Madsen, Daniel Bennie for Poku and Emerson Sutton for Morgan (who had a poor game) made little difference. Worryingly, Dembélé went down clutching his hamstring in the 83rd minute and then limped off, replaced by Harvey Vale, who also made little impact.
Other positives were the fact that Varane was fit enough to play for 25 minutes, although he wasn’t at his best, and Ilias Chair excelling in a more central attacking role. With a striker in front of him, he should be more effective in future. Chair, rather than Dunne, gave the captain’s performance in this game. Walsh also made about half a dozen decent saves, which should give his confidence a boost ahead of next Saturday’s opener.
So, not a great performance, but nothing to set the alarm bells ringing like our 5-0 drubbing by Oxford in the final pre-season game of 2023-24. If Zan Celar is back in the starting line-up on Saturday, I’m reasonably confident we’ll put PNE to the sword.