But thats where Kenny picked us up from so how can we discount that?If we had beaten the spuds the other night this thread would not exist.Remember it took city £300m and two seasons to get into the top 4,Benitez is a fantastic manager but spurs and city were not the force they are now in his tenure.
"Picked us up" is questionable, and that's the point. Got us not quite back to where we were in a season that cost our manager his job with what is now apparently a much better squad is what I can see. The Carling Cup should not be enough to save the manager if we finish 7th despite being allowed to make wholesale changes to the squad, including buying a surplus of players for high transfer fees because they were British and had experience in the league. Unless Downing, Carroll, and Adam come good (looking increasingly unlikely for the ones costing less than 30m pounds) this may prove to have been unwise.
It took City two seasons and 300m pounds (and two managers) to get from outside the EL places into the CL. Yes. With a team that had originally been well out of the CL places basically since the EPL began. City was not a club that had just qualified for the CL for 5 consecutive seasons, winning it once and being runner-up once. One shouldn't need ANOTHER 225m pounds after losing 2 world class players (Alonso and Torres, recouping 75m) just to remain in the top 4 surely?
The point about Benitez is that every positive in Dalglish's reign was a massive negative during his final season, a burden. Dalglish didn't even have to contend with Torres sulking - he sold him instead. And yet on the log we are still worse despite having almost 2/3rds of a season to gel. I'm not saying everything was coming up roses for Kenny, because we were 12th when he took over, but the fact remains that he needed to have us push on from last season - when if anything we've regressed (in terms of results - the most important stat). Yes, we play (arguably) better football than in 09/10, create more chances, concede fewer goals (21 as opposed to 26 at this stage in that season from Benitez), and generally dominate each game, but critically we've only scored 28 goals to the 42 under Benitez (a man criticised for defensive tactics). 42 goals after 24 matches is hardly stellar either, but at least it was on a par with our positional rivals of the day.
I believe we're on the path to improving fortunes, something shown by our ability to be the worse side on only very few occasions, but we have to start turning that into results if we're to take major positives from this season. It's not something that will happen overnight without any major changes (new signings, form players returning from injury/suspension, new tactics etc). The only difference now is that Suarez is back, our key player but the one most guilty of squandering our best chances. The only thing we can hope is that Gerrard, Bellamy, and Suarez can create some magic between now and the end of the season.
The operative word here is "hope". Prior to Suarez's suspension, Gerrard was the only missing element, and I'm yet to see evidence game-for-game that Gerrard's presence is the thing we were missing. Maybe Dalglish is permitted to to take 2 seasons to get us back into the CL given how much change we had to make to the squad, but given that John Henry wants to win the EPL title within the next 2 seasons such slow progress seems unacceptable even to him.
