We’ve seen it before against Doncaster Rovers when substitutes have been made and the game then changes in our oppositions favour, well the same happened at Rotherham on Saturday, but is it fair to say that this was to blame for not winning the game?
Unfortunately I wasn’t at the Milmoor Ground to give my own review on the game and how things panned out over the 90 minutes, but it definately sounded as if Rotherham deserved at least a point out of the game.
Straight from the restart, Lee Trundle grabbed an equaliser just a few minutes before half time and then loanee Marcus Bean put us in the lead on the hour mark, and we now needed to hang on to claim all three points.
The referee’s assistant indicated that 2 minutes of injury time were to be played and surely now we could play football in the corners, even make a third sub to waste time?
Jackett made his first change of the game just a few minutes after we took the lead, Britton came off for Forbes on the right. 10 minutes later and Martinez went off for a second game in a row and O’Leary was his replacement. This seemed slightly strange to me, Martinez should have been there to the end to instruct his team to defend the lead, O’Leary could have joined him in the centre to win back possession when needed and the Spaniard would have been on hand to keep the ball.
With a third change on 87 minutes, we reverted to a 4-5-1 formation as Trundle made way for Owain Tudur-Jones. With O’Leary and Bean in the centre we certainly had the players capable of defending a 2-1 lead.
After watching the highlights, the last goal was simply bad defending and Leon Burton also looked as if he pushed Tate in the back. Nobody was marking Conlon in the box and with Gueret narrowing the angle on Burton, Conlon was able to strike the ball easily into an empty net.
The three substitutes weren’t involved in the move and if we had seen out the dying minutes, obviously there’d be no talk of Jackett’s decisions in the 2nd half!
We saw a classic example of what football is like sometimes and a large amount of Swansea fans said Rotherham deserved something out of the game. Although I didn’t agree with all of the 3 changes, I still don’t think this was the main reason for not winning the game.
