Wednesday, 2 September 2009

Geovanni for Hull City vs Wolves

Time now to have a look at a pretty strange goal from Hull v Wolves. I've picked this one mostly in the hope that Alan Hansen will somehow stumble across all this, whereupon the quality of "defending" on show will hopefully give him a coronary. It's a funny one - at first glance, no idea what's happened except that there's three defenders and the ball all in the back of the net, so I thought it might be an idea to work out how they all got there. Then I looked at it while paying attention and it looked like a clear-cut case of someone wandering in unmarked from an unexpected angle, but then I watched it again and no, it's weirder than that.



It's the first action shown there, no need to skip anywhere unless you object to Gary Lineker's links. We'll pick it up after Wolves have had a couple of goes at clearing the danger and failed both times (so don't worry, United fans, at least you're not the only team with early problems here). I've marked Geovanni. At the moment, he's unmarked, and at the moment it looks like he's hanging around, hoping for a knock-down or a poor clearance to fall to him.


The ball gets moved back and recycled, and you'll see Milijas notice Geovanni and signal that somebody should take care of him...and they do.


That's Matthew Jarvis in this shot who's moved off the wing to cover. That's good!


Unfortunately, Jarvis is primarily an attacking threat, and we can see here that Geovanni's lost him somewhat by going round the back. However, he is still goalside of his man and can at least make things difficult for him...


...except now, fate intervenes. As Jarvis follows Geovanni's run, he collides with the fullback, Elokobi (who is completely unaware of what's going on behind him and has been caught ball-watching). I'd love to know if it really was an accident or if Geovanni somehow managed to run Jarvis into his team-mate.


At any rate, Jarvis is now too far behind Geovanni to do anything, and while Elokobi is much taller than either of them, he's been put off balance and can't stop Geovanni getting in front of him as well. The cross is now on its way, and Wayne Hennessey in goal makes a complete pig's ear of it. I think he may have been expecting the ball driven low to the near post - either way, he flaps pitifully at it, misses completely, and the ball drops neatly onto Geovanni's head.


I don't think that what happened next requires much explaining. Everyone point and laugh at the defenders now.

And that is how that goal was scored.

Next up, I try to think of something to do for next week, and Steven Gerrard demonstrates the power of the quick short corner.

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