Posh v Toon Carling Cup R3 – match preview.
Posted on September 22nd, 2009 | 5 Comments |
It’s partly forced on Hughton as Ameobi, Gutierrez and Simpson are injured and Khizanishvili is cup-tied, but I think Hughton will also see this as an opportunity to rest a few players anyway. We’ll certainly want to win of course but in the grand scheme of things promotion is far more important to Newcastle than Carling Cup progress.
On paper we’re 16 places and 12 points better than recently-promoted Peterborough in the Championship, although Peterborough are unbeaten in their last 5 games.
We’ve never managed to beat Peterborough in the two previous League Cup meetings between the clubs and the last time Newcastle met Peterborough in the League Cup was in 1991 when Ossie Ardiles was manager and Justin Fashanu made an appearance for the Toon.
In this year’s competition Peterborough won 4-0 away to Wycombe in the first round and beat Ipswich 2-1 at home in the second.
Peterborough can score goals and Peter Boyd, Craig Mackail-Smith and Aaron Mclean have accumulated 12 goals between them in all competitions this season and 133 goals since the start of the 2007/08 season. They’ve only failed to score in one game so far this season and I think they’ll test our defence.
I suspect Krul will be keeping goal tonight and we could see Kadar and maybe even Tozer in defence. LuaLua will probably get a start in the midfield and Vuckic might feature up front or in an attacking midfield position. I’m sure Hughton will bring on some of the more experienced players if things start to go wrong, like he did at Huddersfield, but he’ll probably hope he can avoid risking them and keep them fresh for the league.
Match kicks off at 7:45PM.
Promotion must be the priority. And given our paper thin squad (thanks Ashley) we just don’t need games like this.
It’s a competition we’re not going to win, and the longer we’re in it the greater the risk of injury to key players.
I wouldn’t be too upset if we got out tonight!!