Clattenburg was dreadful, but even alllowing for that, we'd win that game 99% of the time. Second half was like a training exercise, attack vs defence.
People will say it's sour grapes, and i'm only saying this because we lost - but Stoke are, by a significant margin, the worst footballing side i have ever seen in my life. All they have is long throws and long punts out of defence to a big man. The devil's advocate in me wonders if they should sign Carra
But seriously, they are so dire, it's laughable. Their fans wont complain because they won, they've progressed since getting into the PL and are on the up compared to where they were 5 years ago. But F**k me, if i was paying good money to watch that sh*te, i'd be in tears every week. The most definitive example of 'anti-football' you could ever get. And it's not about them not having the players or saying that they should try and 'out-football' better sides. There are teams in the PL with considerably worse players than Stoke, who dont resort to that kind of alehouse sh*t. Genuinely embarrassing.
Back to us - we werent at our best, but we F***ing pissed on them, they had one attempt on target all game (the peno) and we must have had about 20, altogether. We were plenty good enough to win that game, but due to a bit of sloppiness on our part, and some bizarre turns of events, we somehow couldnt score.
We werent totally blameless or faultless though - Charlie Adam's passing was F***ing sh*te all day long, his worst performance thus far, needs to improve a shitload, because that was about a 3/10 performance today.
And Henderson - i know he's young and i know he's still settling in, but by lord, a professional footballer, and a technically sound one at that, with all that space, and all the time in the world - never mind MAKING a brew, he could've gone and picked the tea leaves and STILL would've had time to finish - one on one with the keeper and with THREE attempts at it, still couldnt beat Begovic. I'm not going to be abusive or call him sh*t, but that was dreadfully poor that he couldnt score those 3 chances (3-in-1).
Skrtel's effort at the latter end of the half was poor too, and Suarez's instinctive miss at the end, with an open net, was hard to take. Bellamy's header should've hit the target, Downing had a decent headed attempt too and Agger also skied one late on, from a good position. Those are just off the top of my head, but i'm sure there's other chances i've forgotten. All in all, with a touch more luck and better composure/finishing, we would've done enough to have won 3 games, let alone one.
So overall, gutted to lose but on that kind of performance, we'll be fine. If we play like that the majority of the time during the season, we will get top 4 with our eyes closed.
I'll close by saying, i'm a little worried about Carragher - aside from anything else, he should have the experience and intelligence not to be doing what he did in the box - i was behind that goal and it happened very quickly - my instant reaction was 'definite penalty' but i've heard people on the radio say it was 50/50. Having only had one look at it (same as the ref), and as quickly as it happened, i thought...not necessarily that it was a clear penalty - but it was clear that the ref was always going to give it, all day long. In which case, the solution is to not put the ref in that position, whereby he has to make a decision. The 'prevention' would've simply been to not let the forward get ahead of him in the first place. But yeah, aside from his hoofing, which is just Carra, i didnt think he needed to make the 'challenge' that lead to the peno.
Big game next week at Spurs now, we need to bounce back and two consecutive defeats would be a major blow.
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