AFC Bournmeouth fan in peace.
Interesting read, thought it was a good match and on the balance of play a draw was probably a fair result. I've no idea why we didn't sub off Cook or Federici when they both got injured in the first half as you completely dominated in that period. Both came off at half time and we looked a different side in the second half, although you could equally argue that your levels dropped off significantly when McCarthy went off injured.
Having seen Smith try to shoot on quite a number of occasions the bemused look on his face when it went in the top corner was probably because he thought it was an optical illusion and, in fact, the ball was safely slotted into it's usual safe spot after a shot from him in row Z. Still, I thought he gave your full back an absolute roasting from the moment he came on so maybe deserved one to go in for once.
My take on the injury time is like this. A minimum of 5 minutes indicated which doesn't mean 5.00 but could equally mean 5.59.
Barkley scored on 4.45. So between 15 and 74 seconds to go. Normally the clock would keep turning for the celebrations but if there's a pitch invasion the ref will stop the clock and won't start it again until the ball is back in play.
So when we kicked off instead of there being the 0 seconds left there would have been if your fans had stayed off the pitch, there was 15 to 74 seconds left. I think we scored about 30ish seconds later and straight after the new kick off he blew up.
I'm not blaming the fans as you can understand them getting a bit excited having got out of jail a little in injury time but I think if they'd stayed off the pitch we wouldn't have had the chance to score.
Some have said he added time for the invasion and I don't think it's that, it's that he stopped the clock when the invasion started.
As an aside, I thought it was a bit lacking in class from Martinez to claim it was a hopeful punt into the box when Daniels has landed a cross right on Junior's head. Probably just irritation getting the better of him though.
We've had some absolute shockers from refs this season already (them lot up the road from you absolutely got away with it against us, good goal for us disallowed and a goal so clearly offside for them but given that the PL sent a letter to all the clubs saying it should have been disallowed, Swansea got about the softest penalty you'll see this season last week and so on) and some horrible luck/players not taking their chances (absolutely battered Newcastle, should have been 5-0, but somehow contrived to lose, dominated Villa with the same result and more again). Add to that an insane spate of injuries to key players that you're probably bored of hearing about which has meant major tactical changes since the start of the season with which we're only just starting to get to grips but that corner is now turning. All of which is to say, I don't think come the end of the season you'll view a point at Dean Court as badly as some of you rate it now.
I'm genuinely surprised how poor some PL teams are. I thought we were going to get spanked most weeks but I actually feel at this point pretty confident we'll stay up. Unless we get another three cruciate injuries...
All in all though, football eh? Bloody hell.
Good luck for the rest of the season. One game aside, of course.
