P 6 W 0 D 1 L 5 F 2 A 7 Pts 1
During this spell, matches have followed a depressingly similar pattern with the team failing to take adavantage of good starts and, then, from around the twenty five minute mark, the level of performance begins to tail off as the opposition start to get a toe hold in the game. Usually, this results in the away side taking the lead around the half hour mark and, as we all know Dave Jones' City teams never win games when they go a goal down, Ninian Park tends to go as flat as a pancake after that.
The second half of these games are sooooo boring as the visitors comfortably hold on to their lead against a City team that has now completely run out of ideas and don't look remotely like scoring, but, sometimes, their desperation in the final minutes gives them some hope - in the one match where they avoided defeat (Stoke last season), this resulted in a very unlikely equaliser and in the last two games it has resulted in penalties that we have not been good enough to take advantage of and so we lose at home yet again.
Despite what our manager claims, opposition sides do not come here to defend for 90 minutes, they come here in the knowledge that, if they can ride out our attacking flurry at the start of the game, we will give them a goal and then it shouldn't be a problem holding on for the rest of the game. We really are that predictable when we go a goal down and Dave Jones seems completely unable to do anything about it!
God knows what was said to the team at half time today, but they came out and gave a woeful second half performance today which only picked up slightly when we tried the desperate measure of pushing Roger Johnson up front - at least we had the occasional shot then, but, apart from a Paul Parry effort that almost hit the Grange End roof, I can't remember us having a single effort at goal for the first thirty five minutes of the second half.
What was different to normal today was the number of chances we created during the first half spell when we were playing well - there were so many that Coventry should have been a beaten team before Tabb scored a ridiculously easy goal as our defence dozed in the sun, but inept finishing meant that some fine approach play - a superb movement involving maybe as many as twenty passes was spoilt by a feeble MacLean header when it looked easier to score and there were many more where that one came from!
Never mind, Jimmy and Robbie will be playing some month soon, but , as far as I am concerned, they could both have been fully match fit and playing today and they would have been able to do anything with the abysmal service that was provided in the second half today - McPhail, Rae and Sinclair were all anonymous after the break after a good first forty five minutes.
In the second half today as City went from bad to worse, the crowd implored Dave Jones to "sort em out" - judging by what happens to our team in the second half of recent home games, that is something that he is utterly incapable of doing.