Blues’ play ranged from ineffective to diabolical. Tellingly Bristol City had twice as many shots and more on target whilst we had almost twice as much possession and passes. I wonder what statistic most Bluenoses would prefer? We were back to the sideways and backwards mentality as if players were afraid to risk losing the ball.

The oft-maligned James Beadle was probably man of the match and with Christoph Klarer being given a testing time by the Robins’ pony-tailed centre-forward Lorent Tolaj it was good to see Phil Neumann stepping up to the plate.

Out wide, Alex Cochrane was excellent in terms of putting in crosses but in front of our defence Tomoli Iwata and Paik Seung-ho were disappointingly ineffective and generally out-battled. Meanwhile Jhon Solis worked hard but to little effect other than misplacing his passes and being generally crowded out.

In front of them, the attack was little better with August Priske disappointing in the air, too often being out-battled, and Carlos Vicente also failing to hit any heights. As usual Jay Stansfield battled hard for the cause despite playing yet again out of his natural position.

Gray and Ethan Laird made a slight improvement when they came on, which is probably more than can be said for our new Argentinian centre-forward Luis Vazquez who, along with Marvin Ducksch ran around to little effect.

However, football is a simple game so here’s a few tactical tips for Chris Davies:
– when we get goal kicks try and get at least one player standing wide on the other side of the pitch to spread out the opposition defence
-when we get a throw-in, train somebody else to take a long one apart from our 6’5″ centre forward who should be in the box
– when we concede a corner put our quickest player on the halfway line so it will take two of the opposition away from our box and give us an outlet
– don’t overplay to the extent the opposition can funnel back into an impregnable defence.

Chris, are you listening?