Tired and frustrated. Hello, hello, running game, are you there?

WATCHING Giants games from across the pond, here in England, can sometimes be a mentally painful experience.

The Sunday Night Football crunch battle against the Eagles was shown live on a TV channel over here – meaning a start time of about 1.30am as we’re five hours ahead of our friends in the States.

I was planning to record the game on the British version of the DVR but this has proved to be faulty on-occasion and I wasn’t prepared to risk missing this humdinger -so it meant staying up all night despite Monday being a normal work day for me.

So, it’s now 4.51am and I’ll be heading straight to the office in an hour (can‘t risk a quick kip as I‘d definitely oversleep and then be late), where I work for a weekly newspaper.

Losing the kind of tight 17-27 games like tonight’s will now put my sleep-deprived head in an especially bad mood for the rest of the day.

In summary and to quote Chris Collingsworth from the commentary booth: “They [the Giants] had chances but they let them get away – silly plays.”

I think that sums up the game succinctly in what was a wild, error-strewn and back-and-forth game.

Such were the number of game-turning big mistakes that I ended up making eight pages of notes.

Lets be honest with ourselves, the Eagles should have had this one sewn-up long before the Giants mounted a creditable second-half comeback.

Philly’s highly-lauded receivers dropped three easy catches and Vick missed a wide-open Jason Avante in the first half – which could have made all the madcap second-half silliness academic.

I’d said in my blog last week that I wasn’t concerned about the O-line or WRs and that the success of the pass rush would be key to this game. I was wrong. I thought the defence did a great job today (ignoring the two huge run plays near the end).
Justin Tuck had his best game for a while and Rolle made numerous important tackles around the line of scrimmage.
What turned out to be the reason for the loss – a non-existent running game.
Bradshaw and Jacobs never looked like breaking off a big run and it felt like every time the G-Men tried to run, there were three or four Eagles stuffing it. It was the worst I’ve seen the run game for some time.

Yes, the fumbles and Eli’s bizarre decision not to slide (deja vu?) on that crucial play in the fourth quarter were obviously huge, but had we threatened with any semblance of a running game tonight we could have snuck a victory. The sorry stats were 61 yards on 19 carries for 3.2 yards per rush.

Here’s a question for Kevin Gilbride: if you’re getting stuffed at the line of scrimmage every single time, why not try a few screen passes to give Bradshaw at least a few yards of space to work with?

The run game was as flat as Will Blackman after getting crushed on that punt return from Moise Fokou.

Seeing as I’m already feeling disgruntled to start a Monday morning, here’s some more annoying thoughts to add – there’s now six teams in the NFC with a better record than the Giants so making the wild card is going to prove an enormous battle with six games remaining…