BIRMINGHAM CITY 3 CITY 0
League Division 1
19th September 1981
Attendance 20,109
Scorers Evans(2, 47 & 78)
Ref P Richardson
City Corrigan, Bond, Reid, Gow, Caton, Booth, O’Neill, Tueart, Francis, Reeves, Hutchison – sub Boyer(57)
Birmingham Wealands, Langan, Denis, Dillon, Broadhurst, Todd, Brocken, Whatmore, Evans, Handysides, Van Mierlo – sub Worthington(74)
JOHN BOND WRITING IN THE CITY PROGRAMME 23RD SEPTEMBER 1981
I have got to seriously consider what I’m going to do with the team because defensively my worse fears have proved founded. We are not at ease in the back division of the team and this was made abundantly clear at Birmingham last Saturday when we were finally skinned 0-3 and showed a lack of self-discipline which has been causing me concern for some time.
It’s fairly easy to get the team’s game right when going forward. There were times. at Birmingham when our form was a wonderful sight, l’m sure it must have looked every inch as thrilling as it did in the finer days of the Sixties when Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison had the blend correct and attacked with great flair and often with even greater results.
There was so much quality in our early play, especially in the opening 25 minutes when we could easily have been at least three goals to the good. Birmingham would have been the last to complain had they caved in under the weight and skill of our attacks. Then the disease which is afflicting our defensive organisation started to show and we gave away goals like schoolboys concede them.
We should have wiped the slate clean in the next phase of the action, but the goal never came. And with more mistakes riddling our play at the back you could feel that this was one fixture we weren’t going to get to grips with.
In the second half it was not a contest. Birmingham over-ran us and the deficit could have been as many as five goals. It was such a ridiculous transformation. Too many of our players performed in the second period as they wanted to perform and not to the team’s needs. The lack of self-discipline was appalling because too many simply took it on their shoulders that they wanted to do it their way, and much of this attitude was apparent in defence.
I replaced Kevin Reeves not long after the interval because I didn’t feel he was doing his stuff. Nothing was going right for him on the day and it’s been apparent that he’s been working his way through a little grey period recently.
It would be unfair to unload the major part of the blame on any one individual’s doorstep because too many were involved and we were punished for the error of their ways. Like Nicky Reid, who really is proving an enigma.
In the previous game Nicky made an outstanding contribution against Southampton and did so with a defence around him which would have given anyone the jitters. Last week I picked up on a strategic point which I believed would be important to his overall play. And blow me, at Birmingham we go and concede a goal from a situation which had been the one I had basically been telling him about.
Nicky cost us the second goal. He held his hands up at full time and admitted it was his fault. But he, like the others, should know better. He leaves opponents too easily, if his direct rival runs off he lets them run. He will be marking somebody one second and almost in the next breath will have left them alone to got to attack the ball. These are the kind of risks and disciplines we have to be much better about.
For my lad, Kevin, it was his debut, and not one to leave him with a lot of good memories. I’ve put Kevin in an unfortunate position and I’ll have to do something about it quickly. The crux of the matter is that he’s in his best position at centre half, or as second centre half, and it’s not getting the best from his defensive capabilities to play him at full back as I did last Saturday.
It was a tough game in which to bring back Tommy Booth. l’m sure he found the pace pretty hot at St. Andrews. But l am determined to make changes after the form of our defence against Southampton and while the outcome was not what I had hoped and many of the bad traits still remained, at least I got a clearer sight of what is required to cure the main part of the problem.
The grievances which caused me to drop the full back pairing of Ray Ranson and Bobby McDonald are simply explained. l believe defenders have got a job to do in terms of tackling and winning the ball and stopping other people from playing. They have got to support the forwards a little bit and give support to wide men. I didn’t think our full backs were giving me enough of those qualities. I had been making it known to both of them for some time. In fact, I was recognising these flaws in the closing months of last season and they have not yet been attended to.