Pardew blames lack of attack for Brighton cup exit

I’m inclined to agree with him. I’ve calmed down a bit now and had some time to reflect, and aside from lacking in the attacking department we weren’t too bad and had control of the rest of the game.

Unfortunately though, if you can’t create chances or put them away then you’ll be in trouble. Brighton scored with their only real effort on target but if you can’t find the back of the net yourself then you are in trouble.Hopefully this situation will be rectified when we get our main strikers from Africa.

“It’s disappointing because we wanted to go through in this competition, of course,” Pardew told the official club site after the game.

“We didn’t threaten the goal enough tonight. We didn’t have enough creativity. We controlled the game today for long, long periods, but didn’t threaten the goal enough. The whole game we had a good grip on, without ever really unlocking them.”

“The goal was disappointing and maybe because Danny got booked he had to pull out of the challenge, and that set them on the break. They then got a bit of luck to get the goal.”

“They defended well to be fair to them, but we should have threatened the goal more with the possession we had.”

Another disappointing weekend, and it all starts up front for me. To me Shola and Best just weren’t good enough yesterday, either individually or as a pairing. Whenever we got forward there was nowhere to go and the move broke down.

The strikers aren’t the only ones who should garner some criticism however. Our wingers were both awful and I’m struggling to recall a time that Hatem Ben Arfa actually did anything of note. Likewise Jonas Gutierrez, who spent most of his time not being where he was supposed to be leaving our left side pretty vacant.

Still we must now bounce back against Blackburn on Wednesday evening. A positive result at Ewood Park will set us up for the home game against Aston Villa a week today, and if we can get four points from that we can still push on at least give qualifying for Europe a real good go.

“We’ve now got a big game on Wednesday night and we need to make sure we get the right response. There’s two big games this week,” Pardew explained.

“Blackburn is not a good place to bounce back and will be a tough game, but we will threaten the goal a little bit more on Wednesday I hope.”

Wellin terms of our attack at least, we certainly can’t be much worse!