I took a walk after the match (the sun was out here) and had a good dinner to reflect on things and to my disappointment, I feel far less excited about reaching Wembley compared to when we beat West Ham two seasons ago.
With so much talent in this squad, I find it depressing just how bland our football is. It feels like our games are played in a vacuum, where Mourinho's tactics are what determine the game rather than what the players' qualities can actually produce. It's a fact of the sport that players sometimes just don't fire or get it right on a particular day but our play has been insipid for most of the season and I have a hard time blaming the players for that. At the moment, we seem to have an entire attacking squad out of form except for Lukaku and motivation seems to be taking a gradual nosedive over the last few weeks.
We deserved to win today on the balance but no one had a particularly good game except for Matic, Lukaku, and Romero. Justice was served on the goals, since both Matic and Lukaku have put in the work recently to deserve them.
Outside of these guys, you had a few okay performances and others who were poor. I thought Bailly and Smalling were fine, while Valencia looked foolish more than once. The Shaw substitution was bullshit IMO, I though he was fine in the first half before getting hooked for Young.
Needless to say, our attack was much better in the first half before it went to pot after the break. We showed good patience in the first half when dealing with Brighton's low block and Matic made a superb cross to set Lukaku up for the header. The second half, to be honest, was shocking to me in how poorly we went forward. In chasing the game, Brighton tried to open up play and gave acres of space for us to move the ball through...yet our passing was all over the place and our runners couldn't seem to hold onto the ball for very long.
After some bright moments in the first half, Martial became very poor. Mata also became a non-entity. Lingard was nondescript pretty much the entire time he was on. McTominay I thought gave a pretty decent performance. Yes, he gave the ball away a couple of times but considering his age, I think he was no worse than anyone else on the pitch.
We're through to the semis, so in that I can't complain but having watched this dreck and then seeing Jose trash a lineup that he himself set out (not that I disagree, it was poor), you wonder what direction we're really going in...