So we've given the best team in the league (City) one hell of a scare, to the point they're begging for the final whistle, had a goal disallowed wrongly and had 2 near open goals (Johnson / Raheem) missed to get a deserved point. Then we've got battered by Chelsea in the first half after being clearly tired and come back into it, should have had at least 1 penalty, maybe 2 and definitely a man sent off. Don't understand all the negativity really if I'm honest.
We were clearly less fit, we couldn't make changes that they could and our squad was thoroughly exposed. I tried to suggest before the game that anyone who was expecting a win here was really setting their expectations way too high in the circumstances and so it proved. For evidence of how leggy we were just watch Henderson, while some may doubt his talents there's probably not a person in the country who would doubt his energy levels and the lad was simply knackered. When your most energetic player is knackered and you're playing 10 of the 11 that played the last match what do you expect when they have a fresher midfield.
I will say I thought we had some poor performances out there topped off by Glen Johnson, a more abject performance I can't remember. Allen would also have to go into the poor pile and so would Coutinho.
On the plus side I thought Sakho was really good and young Raheem was superb he hasn't deserved to lose either of the last 2 games, really stood out for me.
The difficulty moving forward is that we seem to have picked up a few more knocks and that was also to be expected with 2 games so close together.
I think Brendan can take some flak for leaving Alberto on the bench but it's clear he doesn't rate the lad at this point. That's why I'm confused as to what we do in January because there's too many players that we sign that simply don't figure for us. Is it Brendan who decides, does he actually have a big influence on the decisions, I'm not convinced. If it is him deciding and he then doesn't play his signings then that needs changing, or if it isn't him signing them and someone else is making the decisions then that needs changing, there's a fault somewhere there and it needs fixing before we go spending more money on players who simply wont feature for us.
It's been a hard first half of the season and we all knew that December would be the most difficult and testing for us. I think we can come out of it with our heads held high, we battered Tottenham in a style I've not seen at WHL ever. We terrified City to the point they admitted we're the best team they've faced and ok we limped out a bit at Chelsea after the fixtures caught up with us but we could quite easily have drawn that game too.
Encouraging signs for our future and I believe we'll make a damn good go at getting into that top 4, no I don't think we'll win the title, I thought that was too ambitious a suggestion at the time and maybe got people's hopes up a little too much. It's time for FSG to back Brendan though because the man can only work with the tools he's given and he's running out of them pretty quickly.
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