Not the prettiest of performances but we ground it out and deserved the win in the end. Wood will feel hard done by with the number of chances they had, Davies making a couple of great saves (the best from McNulty !) but we had further opportunities ourselves. Ultimately the quality of the finishing was the difference, with Cookie winning us the game.
We set up with a 442 on the assumption that Wood would be sitting deep, trying to contain us. However, by scoring so early we actually drew them out, which made for a very open and quite an entertaining game. While the 442 gives us more attacking opportunities, it makes us quite vulnerable defensively when teams come at us, like B-Wood did tonight.
Individually, I thought Norwood looked much better, but incredibly missed another one-on-one in the closing stages. Dunn impressed me again with his workrate and Big Mac was pretty solid, apart from his moment of near-glory at the wrong end of the pitch. However, man of the match has to be Cook for his goals, followed closely by Ihiekwe who I thought was excellent throughout.
As ever with Rovers, there had to be a major negative. The loss of the two wingers did not hurt us too much as we already had a two goal cushion, but it would be a disaster for us to lose either of them for an extended spell, particularly Tollitt. You have to give credit to the remaining players for coping reasonably well with a makeshift set up in their absence.
