| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? 17:32 - May 19 with 1662 views | TresBonne |
I keep saying everybody saying that we've got it massively wrong since Christmas, which is very true.
But where does this lie? I really thought we would have kicked on and got better during the season but we've managed to regress instead. We don't seem to have changed a great deal about our tactics, I don't think it's that.
For me, part of it is the injuries - at full strength, our squad is actually very good and has good depth. Then there's the January recruitment. Philogene has been pretty dire, we didn't get that third striker in meaning we had to play AAH, Palmer is also looking like he's regressed since his first few games, Godfrey is basically non-existent unless we get a red card.
Then again, I do still believe that at times we've just been on the wrong end of the stick in games. Think Clarke hitting the post to go 1-3 up at Fulham, yesterday we could've won the game based on the chances we created, conceded just after HT in a big game against United, conceded late against Southampton, could go on.
All in all, I think we'll do ok next season but personally I just can't see these group of lads bouncing us back immediately. I think we will finish in or around the playoffs. [Post edited 19 May 17:33]
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| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 17:40 - May 19 with 1594 views | backwaywhen |
Ask Southampton , Leicester, Burnley , Sheffield Utd and Luton ……there lies the answer ?
None of us good or strong enough , no embarrassment in that , and quite probable two of those above along with Leeds will be back after one season as well . |  | | |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 17:45 - May 19 with 1580 views | wischip |
Another thing to study is how did Wolves get it so right to leave us for dust. |  | | |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 17:53 - May 19 with 1514 views | Radlett_blue |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 17:45 - May 19 by wischip |
Another thing to study is how did Wolves get it so right to leave us for dust. |
Wolves have a decent squad which was seriously underperforming so they changed their manager. Our problem has been the same as the other 3 promoted clubs - our players aren't good enough. Not easy to fix these days unless you ignore FFP. |  |
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| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 17:53 - May 19 with 1509 views | backwaywhen |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 17:45 - May 19 by wischip |
Another thing to study is how did Wolves get it so right to leave us for dust. |
Their team was full of Prem players , only reason they struggled was Gary O’Neil. | | | |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 17:53 - May 19 with 1513 views | Garv |
I think if you asked 20 people, if they had to put the season down to one particular thing or aspect, be it injuries, tactics, finishing, individual mistakes etc, you'd get 20 different answers.
And that tells you everything you need to know. Overall, just not good enough. |  |
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| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 17:58 - May 19 with 1473 views | BloomBlue |
We've simply not been good enough it all areas of the pitch.
Then throw in confidence was eroding, and getting confidence back isn't simple.
I've said on here before the home game against Spurs summed the season up for me. First 10 mins we looked unstoppable, creating chances, not a case of would we win but how many we would win by. Then Spurs first attack they score and the lack of confidence explodes and within five mins it looks like we could end up losing 5 or 6 nil.
Once the confidence goes in a football team it's downhill. |  | | |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 18:02 - May 19 with 1438 views | Smoresy |
I don't think it was going right before Xmas FWIW.
We had 12 points from 17 games on Christmas Day. The Chelsea win lifted us to 15 points from 19 games by New Year's. We're on course for 7 points from the second half of the season, which is really bad lol, but we also needed to do significantly better than our first half of the season to have survived.
Injuries hampered us for sure - been mentioned a lot but the absence of Wes and Chie, Sammie and Chappers, it's made our attack more one-dimensional than it otherwise would have been. And injuries have been far more extensive than just that.
But promoted teams struggling more in the second half of the season is also a common occurrence. Factors likely include conditioning, more familiar tactics for opponents to exploit, and established squads improving at a faster rate because they contain better players. | | | |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 18:06 - May 19 with 1415 views | Bobbychase |
Worth bearing in mind that one of our recent results was a creditable 2-2 at Goodison, where Everton have been flying under Moyes. We won at Bournemouth. It's been mostly bad but not entirely bad. |  |
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| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 18:08 - May 19 with 1400 views | Blue_Heath |
Sorry, but its the tactics (rather the lack of) that are wrong and also too many poor signings that aren't up to it that in turn have ruined our team spirit and drained confidence. But of course the correct narrative here is fine margins....not. | | | |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 18:08 - May 19 with 1390 views | textbackup |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 17:45 - May 19 by wischip |
Another thing to study is how did Wolves get it so right to leave us for dust. |
They’ll drop off once cunha gets his ban, then we’ll catch them |  |
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| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 18:36 - May 19 with 1252 views | benrhyddingblue |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 18:08 - May 19 by Blue_Heath |
Sorry, but its the tactics (rather the lack of) that are wrong and also too many poor signings that aren't up to it that in turn have ruined our team spirit and drained confidence. But of course the correct narrative here is fine margins....not. |
Errr no! The narrative, as the posts on this thread point out if you’d bothered to read them, is that we simply weren’t good enough, and we weren’t. | | | |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 18:37 - May 19 with 1242 views | Radlett_blue |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 17:58 - May 19 by BloomBlue |
We've simply not been good enough it all areas of the pitch.
Then throw in confidence was eroding, and getting confidence back isn't simple.
I've said on here before the home game against Spurs summed the season up for me. First 10 mins we looked unstoppable, creating chances, not a case of would we win but how many we would win by. Then Spurs first attack they score and the lack of confidence explodes and within five mins it looks like we could end up losing 5 or 6 nil.
Once the confidence goes in a football team it's downhill. |
Been a lot of games like that - not much in the game, then Town concede & often then concede another fairly quickly and the game's gone. | |
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| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 18:44 - May 19 with 1194 views | JohnTy |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 17:53 - May 19 by Radlett_blue |
Wolves have a decent squad which was seriously underperforming so they changed their manager. Our problem has been the same as the other 3 promoted clubs - our players aren't good enough. Not easy to fix these days unless you ignore FFP. |
We were very lucky to win at Wolves. Until the final goal we were hoping that we could hang on for a draw. We were being outplayed on every one to one. |  | | |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 19:12 - May 19 with 1087 views | SuffolkPunchFC |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 18:08 - May 19 by Blue_Heath |
Sorry, but its the tactics (rather the lack of) that are wrong and also too many poor signings that aren't up to it that in turn have ruined our team spirit and drained confidence. But of course the correct narrative here is fine margins....not. |
Talking of narratives …
… and one that is equally wrong. | | | |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 19:30 - May 19 with 1008 views | Churchman |
Injuries, continual change of the team, dreadful midfield unable to control games.
The main reasons though are:
Teams always work out promoted clubs second half of the season.
Secondly, all the 17 established teams improved considerably, including Wolves. They just ran away from the three at the bottom.
Lastly, confidence. It drained away with continual beatings. |  | | |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 19:41 - May 19 with 930 views | Kievthegreat |
If I had to give the most basic answers I'd say squad quality/depth and confidence.
We made some good signings and a lot of middling to poor signings. Crucially I think we failed to improve enough in the middle of the park because Phillips never showed what he could do and Morsy unfortunately just didn't have another gear to shift in to. Also didn't help that we stacked injuries to Burns and Ogbene.
I think we're not that far off. I'm not suggesting that with some better luck we'd have stayed up (although it wouldn't have hurt). It's just that you don't need to be twice as good to double your points tally. An incremental improvement, especially in our worst areas would possibly have been enough. Replacing AAH in the Summer as we intended would have given Delap more of a break when Hirst was injured. If we'd got our midfield right we may not have been overrun in the middle of the park so often and so brutally at times. Spending better in goal may have yielded some critical extra points.
If those happen in the Summer, then maybe we get to Jan with more points, but also more confidence. It shouldn't be forgotten how crucial confidence was to us last year, it helped us recover from one-off bad games. As it was this year, we dropped off and got successive bad results and a fair few tonkings. Top that of with gutting defeats like Southampton and I think we never recovered. If we have more buffer or simply turn a few gutting results into positive ones, I think there's a chance to turn it around.
Essentially we scored 5/10 on recruitment in the Summer. If we'd scored 7 or 8/10, then we'd have put up a better fight. As it was we were close on points to a Wolves team in a false position, who were nowhere near as Gary O'Neil had them playing for the first 15 games. |  | | |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 20:08 - May 19 with 804 views | itfcsuth |
I don’t think it’s a massively over complicated situation.
I think by Christmas we’d probably had that real momentum we’d previously used sucked out of us a little, then followed by a run of negative momentum.
Ultimately we just didn’t have enough quality to string results together.
It’s the key takeaway from the season, the level of player you need at PL, both physically and technically. |  | | |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 20:40 - May 19 with 634 views | Pendejo |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 18:06 - May 19 by Bobbychase |
Worth bearing in mind that one of our recent results was a creditable 2-2 at Goodison, where Everton have been flying under Moyes. We won at Bournemouth. It's been mostly bad but not entirely bad. |
Chelsea home and away |  |
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| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 20:42 - May 19 with 624 views | Broadbent23 |
1. The coaching staff although chosen by KMc do not have the experience needed to get our League one and Championship players to the necessary standards required for Prem players. 2. Also with all the injuries all team selections have been patched up and thus losing any gelling for set pieces. In the last Leicester game it was evident Team tactics were missing. 3. KMc from Xmas was too rigid with his game plans and unfortunately we became easily read by all teams. 4. Having only one class player in Delap we were short of game winners. 5. I also believe our League one players could not handle Prem football every week. 6. Generally our Championship players have been too young to achieve Prem standards. Going forward we need a few foreign coaches and players to be drafted into the team because KMc will find it difficult to motive this current squad. | | | |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 20:43 - May 19 with 617 views | warky_1970 |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 17:45 - May 19 by wischip |
Another thing to study is how did Wolves get it so right to leave us for dust. |
Wolves and Everton were both massively underperforming for the first half of this season. Both very decent squads and it was obvious watching them that they were never going to be going down once they put a couple of wins together. |  | | |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 22:25 - May 19 with 413 views | Nthsuffolkblue |
| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 17:45 - May 19 by wischip |
Another thing to study is how did Wolves get it so right to leave us for dust. |
I would imagine a look at consistency of team selection would give some indication.
We simply never built partnerships on the pitch all season. Injuries certainly hampered that but it seemed to get worse rather than better as the season progressed.
It can't even be blamed on bringing in lots of new players in January either.
We need to get the players we have playing as a team ahead of next season. |  |
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| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 23:42 - May 19 with 291 views | bournemouthblue |
My opinion is you need to frontload your points on promotion, teams often work you out for the second fixture
Not turning all those draws into wins was what killed us |  |
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| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 02:49 - May 20 with 162 views | Illinoisblue |
Also; set pieces (failures from at both ends of the pitch). Was Taylor’s goal at Wolves the only set piece we scored all season? Must be more surely Shirley? |  |
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| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 04:30 - May 20 with 57 views | Ryorry |
Injuries, injuries, injuries.
Others have said that we failed to recruit enough quality players. Well we had quality players, but we had so many injuries, especially hamstrings, that KM was unable to put out his first choice team for even two games in succession, so of course key partnerships couldn’t be built.
Losing one of our best defenders for months due to a freaky domestic injury was sheer ill luck, but I hope our there’s a thorough investigation into/by our sports science and medical departments re the particular physical rigours of the EPL, and our allegedly extraordinarily intensive training sessions.
[Post edited 20 May 4:34]
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| What has actually gone wrong since Xmas? on 05:08 - May 20 with 40 views | trncbluearmy |
Injuries, some bizarre ref. decisions,
Phillips never performing,
but mainly a transfer strategy that on paper made sense but in reality didn't work |  | | |
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