West Bromwich Albion’s trip last night to Nottingham Forest saw a number of below-par performances for the players.
Travelling to the City Ground for our second Championship tie of the 2018/19 campaign, in many ways we were lucky to go into the halftime break with a 0-0 scoreline, and Forest had opportunities to extend their 1-0 lead when they took advantage in the second period. In a poor performance from West Brom though, the players didn’t give up and kept plugging away and ultimately finished incredibly strongly – so much so we might have nicked it in the final ten minutes especially as not only did we bag the equaliser through Matty Phillips, we also hit the woodwork twice.
One man who shone on a statistics front was former Arsenal fullback Kieran Gibbs as Whoscored made him our Man of the Match with a performance rating of 7.76.
Amongst a number of poor performances despite our stronger finish, Gibbs was one of only four players to get a rating of above seven in their system with goalscorer Matty Phillips, Ahmed Hegazi and Jakes Livermore joining him – but his overall performance just tipped the balance in his favour over Phillips.
Three key passes with over 80% pass accuracy amongst a number of tackles, interceptions and blocks paid off for him – I bet the assist helped as well!
Now if everyone else can more quickly come up to his level, Darren Moore might see his early season fortunes change.
