Missed Opportunities Prove Costly For Posh

Peterborough United came away empty handed from Saturdays match against Doncaster Rovers despite dominating the majority of the match.

Backed by a noisy crowd in London Road and both the North and South stands, Posh made a dominant start to the match and dictated the possession.

However, Posh failed to convert the many opportunities that came their way. George Boyd and his cultured left foot was the main culprit as he had the majority of the clear-cut chances Posh created.

Grant McCann opened the scoring with a thunderous shot after 19 minutes and almost doubled the lead moments later. The feeling around the ground was that this could turn into another rout similar to the Ipswich game. Unfortunately, instead going in to half-time with a 2 or 3 goal cushion, it was only the one goal advantage Posh had.

Expectations were high at the start of the second half, but immediately, you could tell that Posh felt they had done enough and were lethargic and lacked any tempo. Slow balls passed around the back four and to the occasional midfielder soon started to ebb the high expectations away.

Dean Saunders had changed his tactics to try to stop Posh passing the ball around midfield and it seemed to work. Every time a Posh defender had the ball, virtually all the Posh forwards and midfielders had, what it seemed a man-to-man marker.

This tactic stifled Posh to some extent but they still dominated possession without creating as many clear cut chances as they`d made in the first half. Posh hit the woodwork on 3 occasions, including one from a quickly taken freekick by Tommy Rowe who played a one-two before firing his shot against the post. Rowe also had a goal ruled out for off-side.

With the new tactics brought in by Saunders, their only outlet was to try to catch Posh on the break and unfortunately for Posh, this proved deadly as they caught Posh cold and plundered two goals passed a rather disappointing Paul Jones.

Jones often seems to be caught out by long range efforts and the second goal, albeit an initial mistake by Ryan Bennett, Jones didn`t move until the ball was firmly in the back of the net. I believe Joe Lewis may have done better with both goals conceded and would like to see him given a chance back in the starting line-up in place of Jones.

Despite going behind, Posh still dominated the game but were either too intricate trying to pass the ball through the opposition or were lumping it forward for Sinclair to race on to. Although Sinclair did manage to win some of these balls he demonstrated, in our opinion, that he is still only the standard of an average League Two player.

This is an area that needs to be looked at as the personnel we currently have, don`t seem to be working at the minute and we all know that in this League, if you don`t take your chances, you could easily lose games that you should be winning…which is what happened to Posh on Saturday.

To look at it on the positive side, we are creating plenty of chances, but as already mentioned, you need to take the chances that come along and our forwards aren`t doing that.

Hopefully the International break will give the team time to focus on how well they have done this season so far but also what they need to do to progress and improve as a team.

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