please if tino asprilla is on your side you know there's a problem somewhere.
i feel this could be just like kenny's time with blackburn were he struggled the first season but started killing teams the next. we are not far off , score half the times we hit the post and we would be shooting up the table.
Hitting the post and missing penalties has been the story of our season. I think the hit the post count is 35 in the EPL, and we've scored 47 goals. So if we convert half those non-penalty chances, our goal difference changes from 8 to 25, or 3rd in the league. Our missed penalties (7) can offset the hit the bar count from all our opponents combined. Also 17 more goals added to 47 is 64, joint 4th with Spurs - not great, but "top 4 form" certainly. The season's complexion changes rather dramatically, doesn't it? And that's
with playing Henderson in a position he's not taken to
and with no goals or assists from Downing, and Flop of the Year Adam clogging up the midfield for half a season.
My honest impression is that our tactical struggles, letting in simple goals week after week, trouble with the officials in the early part of the season, the Suarez ban, and the difficulty with which some players have taken to playing in the red shirt suggests this season we played as badly as this team can play. Yet we still won a cup, reached a second final, and if things go well today could find ourselves only 1 position lower on the table than last season, a relative position that is largely irrelevant in the light that we already qualify for Europe.
And *that* is why I am optimistic about next season even should FSG do the apparently unpopular thing by keeping the manager.
Good points, but 1. Adam has better goals and assists stats than the other midfield signings and not much worse than our new striker (!!!) and was only 8 million. How you can think that makes him flop of the year is beyond me.
and 2. You make too much of hitting the post, its easy to say imagine if we convert half of them, well sorry but life doesn't work like that, it is an off target shot. Means absolutely nothing for next season. It makes just as much sense to say what if we hit the post twice as much as it does to say we're gonna hit it half as much.
Don't mean to rant at you because more realistically I do agree you would think (or certainly hope) we would convert more chances next season and chance creation on the whole has been quite good from the team, but hypothetically musing on suddenly converting a bucket load more chances doesn't equate to realistically predicting next season, what if we don't create as many chances?
Players like Henderson have been useless in cm as well as rw, downing useless for all but a handful of games, I know you think Carroll has been better for longer than I think he has so we will have to agree to disagree in his particular case but Kenny has shown a disastrous debut season with no where near enough evidence to strongly suggest he could turn it around. Thinking he could IS built up of as much hope as it is of actual evidence (not saying there is no evidence because there is in terms of some of our play, just saying its half and half with hope).
This season all but Utd and City in terms of the top teams, have looked [oops] poor for long parts of the season, this was a fantastic opportunity to get top 4. Over 100 mill to bring in anyone but the very top players who wouldn't come. Teams vying for top 4 being sh!te. Momentum from belief following the run at the end of last season. You would certainly think top 4 will be much harder this season as more established teams with better managers consolidate their positions. Kenny looks clueless as to how to get their, what players to buy, when it was relatively easy to get 4th, let alone in a normal season (not all of this was aimed at you thundyr, some of it was just my thoughts on Kenny in general).
As a further point, apparently (and I'm by no means saying its a definite) Skrtel is jumping ship now? if true he has no faith that the manager can do it, so why should we?
