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Pardew – The Importance of Steven Taylor

11 years ago
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After the match Alan Pardew was ruing the fact that when Steven Taylor was forced off in the second half it opened the floodgates.

“We’re hoping Steven Taylor is alright, there’s a little strain there and that’s his bad leg so we didn’t want to chance it. That disruption cost us a couple of goals if I’m honest as we were ok until then, hopefully he’ll (Taylor) be alright for United (Alan – we’re United !!) next Sunday”.

With Coloccini’s injury forcing him to miss yesterday and Alan Pardew already admitting that the captain is, “…sweating for Manchester United“, it doesn’t bear thinking about facing Man.U. without our two centre-backs.

As the Reading match showed, when you have a Colo or Steven Taylor alongside Williamson they can hold things together, similarly with one of them partnering James Perch.

Having Williamson and Perch together leaves us wide open as was shown yesterday.

It was a real smash and grab yesterday with our two on target attempts going in, one of them a brilliant goal out of nothing.

In contrast Reading could have had four or five as Harper made a couple of decent saves and the woodwork did its bit.

Before Taylor’s departure I can only remember one real scare when the Reading striker totally outwitted Williamson and chested the ball down just before half-time, only for a great Perch intervention to keep it at 0-0.

If we are going to be missing Colo and Taylor then Demba Ba had better up his strike rate!

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