Goal Fest

There were buck­ets of goals in the Cham­pi­onship this past week­end. Three matches had 3–0 score­lines (Ply­mouth beat Nor­wich, Charl­ton beat Cardiff, Hull beat Pre­ston), West Brom thumped 10-man Coven­try 4–0, Sheffield Wednes­day lit up Southamp­ton for five goals and Ipswich embar­rassed Bris­tol City by a 6–0 scoreline.

For Coven­try, striker Michael Mif­sud was sent off after only 10 min­utes for a nasty and fla­grant elbow on defender Carl Hoe­fkens, but it took the Bag­gies until the 56th minute to cap­i­tal­ize on their advan­tage. Fil­ipe Teix­eira ran riot for West Brom with two goals and set up another.

As Brian men­tioned on the most recent episode of the Cham­pi­onship Talk pod­cast, Southampton’s defence was sham­bolic against Sheffield Wednes­day. The prime exam­ple for me was early into the sec­ound half on Akpo Sodje’s first goal when four Southamp­ton defend­ers could not con­tain two Wednes­day for­wards. They all appeared con­fused and sim­ply stood off Sodje as he fired the ball past Kelvin Davis. That seemed to open the flood­gates and Wednes­day had the run of the match the rest of the way. Man­ager George Bur­ley said “To con­cede in the man­ner we did was ridicu­lous. You can’t defend like that.” The Owls are now unbeaten in four matches and look to be turn­ing their sea­son around.

Pro­mo­tion favourites, Charl­ton, sit in third place just two points back of West Brom. Chris Iwelumo was on tar­get again for Charl­ton and now has 7 goals in 16 appear­ances this sea­son and has been a very solid sign­ing. The loss for Cardiff pushed them to the edge of the rel­e­ga­tion zone. They remain above the drop solely on goal dif­fer­ence and the heat will be turned up on man­ager Dave Jones. Jones has already been under fire for the team’s poor start, been taken to task for miss­ing a reserve game to attend the launch of chair­man Peter Ridsdale’s book and has been put up “for sale” on eBay, by a dis­grun­tled fan who hoped the club would take the hint and sack Jones.

In a bat­tle of strug­gling sides, Norwich’s extended their run with­out a vic­tory to 12 matches while Ply­mouth grabbed their first vic­tory in four attempts.

Ipswich were pow­ered by a Jonathan Wal­ters hat trick as they cruised past Bris­tol City. They con­tin­ued their 100 per cent record at Port­man Road in the league this sea­son and tore apart an oppo­si­tion side that many expected to present them with a tough match. Ipswich looked a class apart at times and David Wright’s header for the sec­ond goal was a thing of beauty.

Here’s hop­ing the goals keep flow­ing in the next round of matches!