Difficult to understand Gerrard's reasoning for bringing back Flanagan, over a player who was arguably our best performer in the previous match. When the team was announced, my only thought was that Flanagan is probably better in the air than Halliday, and we can expect a long ball bombardment. Unfortunately for Jon, other than a few matches earlier in the season where he played reasonably well, he has looked exactly as you would expect a right footed player to be playing at left back - out of position and easier to exploit. I specifically looked for the number of times he controlled and passed the ball with his left foot last night. The answer - Once. He played a free kick backwards to Goldson. Not once in open play. It just makes us horribly unbalanced as a team as we can only attack down the right hand side and the opposition have sussed this out and are able to counter this by overloading their left hand side with additional numbers.
I agree with the comment above where Barasic is our first choice LB, with Halliday covering him. Flanagan should be an emergency LB only and covering Tav when he is injured or suspended.
However, SG could have taken off basically anyone last night. Ejaria, Coulibaly, Morelos all had their worst match of the season. Jack did his normal tidying up and interception role, but held onto the ball too long, allowing the Aberdeen players to get behind the ball. Middleton took the safe option on the few times that he had the ball and Candeias was his normal industrious self, but with no end product.
Really disappointing performance, and it looks like we have learnt nothing from the defeat in the SF