Not blaming Gerrad for the slip - anyone can slip so Im not sure where you're getting the "hanging blame on his shoulders" bit from.
The blame is with our strategy. If our team was back in our own half - with a minute to go till the halftime whistle - Ba has much less time before another defender or Mig is on him and there are players closing down his options even if he did slip. Doesn't guarantee he doesn;t score but massively decreases the chances.
at the time of the slip Gerrard was flanked by the two CBs almost at the halfway line and there was no other player in our half - what were we taking that risk for? We weren't creating much at the other end and even if we had got the three points we would still be having to beat Palace etc. It's like sending the goalkeeper up for a corner in the first half. Completely unecessary risk and unfortunately naive.
Well you're basing your entire reasoning around that one incident and had it not happened Chelsea would not have had their goal, they would have never scored a goal, in fact they would have been lucky to get out of their own half.
So if you take that incident in isolation we were doing nothing different than what we've done all season, to ask Brendan to make us sit deeper while at home against a team who've clearly not come to win the game would be foolish. We would then have had to win our remaining 2 games when what was on offer was the chance to win this game and make the remaining 2 games even easier.
We weren't exactly going gung-ho we were in fact just passing it around the back at the time, part of the tactics you're suggesting we should have employed more, just deeper? Well if that mistake had happened while we were deeper then nobody would have been able to recover and Migs would have been on his line making it an even simpler finish for Ba.
It's one of those where hindsight makes it obvious that a defender should have been deeper and able to recover but we haven't played like that since Gerrard has taken up his new role and if you watch the incident again it is only because it is such a massive slip that Stevie can't recover in time. So for me there was nothing tactical about the loss other than our inability to score and the weight of the blame lies more on our players in wide areas than it can possibly weigh on Brendan. I know it hurts, I was physically sick for days after it, my brain still has a cloud hanging over it filled with frustration, despair and rage at the cruel nature of luck but hopefully there's a silver lining and that can all be forgotten in the glory but at the end of the day we can all only play the cards we're dealt and we just got a bad one.
Logged