U23s lose to very late Man City penalty

I watched this match on a City stream but no commentary, just a team sheet from the City site to identify their players. I thought we generally matched a very good City team and certainly deserved a draw. Simms and Connolly had good chances but equally Harry Tyrer made a few good saves to deny City attackers.

For City, Tommy Doyle, Mike Doyle's son, who”s featured for their first team was the key player in midfield, controlling the pace and tempo of the match, a classy player. For us, I had Tyler Onyango as our best player, he's developing into quite a beast of a player and developing his forward play into a real box-to-box midfielder. You could hear Unsworth constantly shouting his name throughout the match, which I took as a good sign him getting special attention. Iversen was also very prominent in attacking moves, Hughes was often deeper but was spraying some great passes forward. At the back Astley had another composed game at centre back, interestingly he played left centre-back in the first half but switched with Ouzounidis to right CB for the second half.

Simms worked hard throughout, and scored a pretty simple goal really made by him harrying their goalkeeper into a mistake resulting in a tap in.

We really missed the pace and skill of Josh Bowler out wide, I suspect he's now moving out on loan as he should do. But it meant we had no out-and-out attacking threat alongside Simms. It looked like Iversen and Onyango had been told to play the attacking role, Iversen left, Onyango right side, then when we didn't have the ball drop back into a five-man midfield with Baningime in the centre, Hughes widest right, Joe Anderson widest left.

While this sounds a bit like a defensive format it was very much in line with how the first team played at times on Saturday, a hard-working No 9 supported by two attackers who dropped into a 5 man midfield to defend. We don't have the wide attacking skills at this level to imitate the first team but the formation and work ethos is very similar which is encouraging.