Don't blame Lennon

I thought the long walk back to the car after seeing us lose was bad enough; how mistaken I was. We had to endure Harry telling us that he was a bit miffed with Aaron Lennon because he came off without telling anyone.

Firstly, that's not true. I was in the Paxton end and could see very clearly that Lennon went down and then came off just a few metres from the dugout. Danny Murphy (our physio) quickly ran out to Lennon. Danny, explained to Harry that Aaron could not carry on.

Now that we've cleared that up, let's talk about the match. Firstly, when you're playing sides like Stoke, it's fairly obvious that you shouldn't be lobbing long balls up to your strikers. In my opinion, you shouldn't be doing that anyway, no matter what side you're facing, but against Stoke, it's a big no-no. Why? Because their centre-backs can lap balls like that up until the cows come home. We didn't do this a lot in the first half, but during the second half, it became plan A, B & C. Secondly, you don't play two defensive-midfielder's in Palacios and Huddlestone.

Stoke had set out their stool. They decided to go for it and so deployed a 4-4-2 formation. Harry may as well have played a 4-5-1. I'm not sure why, but Robbie, for large portions of the match, was coming so deep. Huddlestone did nothing, and I mean nothing. This game was crying out for Jenas, or another attack-minded midfielder to play alongside Palacios, yet we decided to not go all-out. Can someone explain why? I would ask Harry, but he just wants to rant about Lennon going off.

The truth is that we did have chances and quite of lot of them. It was just one of those days, but if Harry had opted for a more adventurous line-up, you may have been reading a different sort of article.

Fulham and West Ham did us a favour and we're still in the top four, but if we continue to deploy tactics like the one 36,000+ of us witnessed on Saturday, that top four will be a distant dream.