{"id":658585,"date":"2025-08-24T00:00:34","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T04:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/football\/?p=658585"},"modified":"2025-08-23T12:25:21","modified_gmt":"2025-08-23T16:25:21","slug":"three-talking-points-oxford-united-lose-birmingham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/football\/2025\/08\/24\/three-talking-points-oxford-united-lose-birmingham\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Talking Points as Oxford United Lose at Birmingham"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oxford United<\/a> suffered a third league loss of the season with a 1-0 defeat at high-flying Birmingham.<\/p>\n

The last time the U’s suffered three defeats at the start of the season came in the 2018\/19 campaign.<\/p>\n

Here are three talking points from the game.<\/p>\n

Read More<\/strong>: Rangers Defender Ben Davies Joins Oxford United on Loan<\/a><\/p>\n

Oxford United Lose at Birmingham<\/h2>\n

Defensive Formation<\/h3>\n

Having failed with a 4-4-2 in the previous two league games, Gary Rowett switched to a back five for the visit to St. Andrew’s.<\/p>\n

Jamie Cumming stayed in goal but he had a back three of Brodie Spencer, Michal Helik and Sam Long. Rowett also saw Hidde ter Avest and Greg Leigh selected as attacking wing-backs.<\/p>\n

The big call was to leave club captain Elliott Moore on the bench, but his replacement in Long was arguably Oxford’s best player in defence.<\/p>\n

On the whole, the backline looked ok but the wing-backs didn’t offer a lot in the final third.<\/p>\n

De Keersmaecker Debut<\/h3>\n

Another positive was a league debut for record signing, Brian De Keersmaecker.<\/p>\n

The Belgian midfielder, who missed the start of the campaign with injury, put in a decent display in the middle of the park alongside Cameron Brannagan.<\/p>\n

The 25-year-old got stuck in, helped his side up the pitch and had a good energy for the most part, but ran out of steam in the second half due to lack of minutes.<\/p>\n

Birmingham Wasted Chances<\/h3>\n

While it was only a narrow defeat on paper, the hosts could, and probably should, have been out of sight by half time.<\/p>\n

Summer signing Ky\u014dgo Furuhashi squandered two early chances; first shooting wide when one-on-one with Cumming before nodding a header over from inside the six-yard box.<\/p>\n

And there were further chances for the hosts across the 90 but Cumming was barely tested between the sticks.<\/p>\n

While the football under Rowett is conservative, he does keep his sides within games and that can be taken as a positive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oxford United suffered a third league loss of the season with a 1-0 defeat at high-flying Birmingham. The last time the U’s suffered three defeats at the start of the season came in the 2018\/19 campaign. Here are three talking points from the game. Read More: Rangers Defender Ben Davies Joins Oxford United on Loan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":335,"featured_media":658587,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8430,33,32],"tags":[1318],"class_list":["post-658585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oxford-united","category-championship","category-league-football","tag-birmingham-city"],"modified_by":"Dale Ventham, Editor","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/335"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658585"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":658586,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658585\/revisions\/658586"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/658587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/football\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}