- Aug 31, 2005
- 3,164
- 10,483
Skipp clearly wasn’t the slightest bit fit enough, if he was PEH would’ve come offAll seemed to go wrong after PEH's injury. I thought we were very, very comfortable in the first half and kept West Ham at bay and the crowd extremely quiet.
Not sure what went on with Hojbjerg. He appeared to signal he was 100% done right after half time - I'd have thought Skipp & Sarr would've had an extensive warm-up at half time in case that happened but everyone seemed surprised. Somehow he stayed on though.
After that it was clear he was very uncomfortable and barely getting around the pitch; coupled with Bissouma being on a yellow that meant we lost the middle of the park.
Skipp clearly isn't match fit and they felt he couldn't last best part of 45 minutes.
Even so, West Ham still weren't in the game until we gifted them a goal. Conte should be fuming; so many players switched off but I'm going to pinpoint Perisic as worst culprit and with his wealth of experience that should not be happening.
This lifted the crowd and gave West Ham belief that really didn't seem to be there before that. Instead of keeping them at arms' length we got into a nasty habit of passing the ball slowly (especially at the back), not giving each other options (partly due to PEH immobility) and their backs were up meaning they found an extra 20% and their press become much more aggressive.
Conte clearly didn’t trust Sarr in that game, or maybe any game