Improvement needed for Middlesbrough trip

What. A. Game. Aston Villa scored five goals at home and still only come away with a point. It was a crazy game. We can take positives and negatives from the performance. We may have scored five but we also conceded five. If we are being honest, they were five pretty easy goals for Nottingham Forest. We come up against Middlesbrough tomorrow and much improvement is required.

Improvements

A lot has been made about the performances of our goalkeeper, Orjan Nyland. I feel that over recent weeks he has improved but you can’t escape the fact that he failed to make a single save against Forest.

The goal that really bothered me was the fifth goal. Nyland was beaten at his near post. Watching live and then re-watching the replays, he shouldn’t be getting beaten from that angle at his near post. Lewis Grabban had no other option but to aim for the near post so the keeper should have had this covered. As I stated before, we gifted some goals and this was one of them. You can bet your bottom dollar that Middlesbrough will look to pump balls into the box and put the keeper under as much pressure as possible.

Someone else who needs to take a look at his performances in recent weeks is captain James Chester. I am a big fan of Chester but recently I have been a nervous wreck watching him.

He looks like he is nervous everytime he gets the ball at his feet. It has become a bad habit of him giving the ball away cheaply far too frequently for my liking. We all know what he is capable of so we have come to expect more of the Wales defender. I am unsure if he is carrying an injury or he is just uncomfortable in the style of play we currently play. Like Nyland, Tony Pulis will get his Middlesbrough side to target this.

Positives

I don’t need to tell you that going forward we are quite good. We have scored 12 goals in our last 3 outings in the Championship. It goes without saying that Tammy Abraham is a massive positive and if we were to be critical we could say he should have scored a couple more against Forest.

It was good to finally see Yannick Bolasie start which was suspected given the injury to Albert Adomah. He impressed and had the Forest full-back tied up all game. His crossing leaves a little to be desired but I think this is something our whole team could do with working on.

Another positive was the re-introduction of Anwar El-Ghazi. He looked a constant threat when he came on with twenty-five minutes left to play. He produced a wonderful strike and looked very eager to impress. I am sure he could feature again against Middlesbrough following his positive display.

It is great to see us playing attacking free-flowing football but we must tighten up at the back. Wednesday nights game was full of entertainment but we won’t get promoted playing like this. Strengthen up at the back and we could just nick thee points from Middlesbrough in their own back-yard.