By Matty Blakeman
September 27 2002

Matt talks about Juan Sara and his critics and says "Give the big man a chance." Matt also points out who the critics are not the press or anybody associated with the press the critics are the fans.

Give Juan A Chance

On Wednesday night, Juan Sara, at long last got back on the scoring trail with a brace against Queen of the South in the C.I.S. Cup in his man of the match performance. This brings an end to Sara’s barren run stretching back to April of this year. Hopefully, these strikes can bring Juan back to the form that he can produce on a regular basis and silence some of his critics. These are the critics who single out Sara to have a dig at him if he makes a mistake even though little is said if someone else loses the ball. The critics, who are supposed to be fans, that refuse to give the guy a chance despite his best efforts. These are the people that really annoy me at Dens. They wait for the ball to go near Sara so, if he doesn’t win a tackle or a header, they can criticise him before he’s even made his move. Their mind is made up about him before he has a chance to do anything. I admit that his form this season has been poor and he does even irritate me when he refuses to jump for easy headers, which result in him getting beaten, but his confidence and form won’t improve if he is criticised by his own fans throughout an entire match. Amazingly, there were still some on Wednesday who still weren’t satisfied with his excellent performance. What more do these people want? They shouldn’t be coming to Dens.

It was a comfortable win from a Sara inspired Dundee on Wednesday, despite Queens, to their credit, having a go in the second half and scoring a stunning goal. In truth, though, the game was over after 20 minutes when Caballero, almost embarrassingly, tapping home after a dreadful mistake from the 17 year old 3^rd choice Queens keeper who made amends with a remarkable block from Gavin Rae early in the second half. It followed a respectable showing from Dees last Sunday against the I.R.A. loving champions who seem to be on a downslide. Wilkie, as always, was immense and deserved of his man of the match as he prevented Larsson from getting barely a sniff of goal throughout the match. This meant that it would take a wonderful goal to score against a tough Dee defence, boosted also by another stormer by Tom Hutchinson. And allegedly, Larsson scored a beauty (I’m with Wilkie, I thought it was a fluke too at first) Credit though to the Dees, who continued to press Celtic back to final whistle in an attempt to punish Petrov for 2 sitters. Still though, we struggle to take a free kick. When we have a free kick on the edge of the box, why does one of our on players (Nemsadze) standing 2 yards in front of the ball, thus blocking Caballero’s shot? Not a situation to cause havoc on the minds of McCoist and Parrott in a “What happens next?” round. This needs to be fixed; it’s embarrassing having to see this shambles every week.

This weekend, we face Motherwell in a match where literally anything can happen. It’s possible that we’ll be minus Nacho-man, Fab Cab and Georgi so I’m predicting a 1-1 draw, if not 1-0 the Dee. Sara on the score sheet again.