Paid wum taking a carefully calcluated swipe in a pathetic attempt to add more pressure in the media. Ignore, lads
Jordhino isn't that bad
Many people have said that all AVB had to do to succeed was continue the good work done by Redknapp and build upon healthy foundations. But that’s just not the case. Totally ignoring the players we’ve lost for a moment, AVB’s having to repair rotten foundations, re-build the soul of the team, boost confidence and morale, get a losing team back to winning ways.
Our form now is a hangover from our form at the end of last season. AVB was given a team that was rock bottom in so many respects. We may have finished fourth, but that did not adequately represent just how truly awful we’d been in 2012.
If you take the second half of our season – the second set of 19 games – we won just seven matches. A win percentage of just 36%...and three of those wins (none of which were convincing) came in our final four games. If the league existed just over that period of time we’d have been in 9th position, behind Wigan, Fulham, Everton and the usual suspects.
Those figures include an additional game for us compared to all the other sides (the postponed Everton match @ WHL, because of the riots). If those three points are discounted, we drop to 11th place.
There’s been lots of people saying “mid-table here we come” and such, well mid-table’s been beckoning for a while. We’ve had the form of a mid-table side for 5 months prior to AVB’s arrival. This isn’t his fault, our poor early season form isn’t exclusively of his doing.
If you look at the nine game run from the 5-2 loss at the Emirates in February until the 1-0 loss to QPR in April – a period that represents almost a quarter of the season – we were 19th in the form guide. Played 9, won 1, drew 3, lost 5. 6 points from a possible 27. Goals scored = 9, goals conceded = 14. 0.67 ppg. Only Wolves were worse off. Only two sides (Wolves and Norwich) conceded more goals.
Five teams conceded five goals twice or more in a single game in the league last year, and we were one of them. Norwich, QPR, Bolton and ourselves conceded five goals twice, Wolves conceded five goals three times. Two of the five teams are now in the Championship.
We’ve been crap for a while. Not only is AVB having to prepare for life after King, Modric and van der Vaart, he’s also having to turn around the fortunes of a club that has been in a six month slump. Frankly, given the form of the side it’s easy to see why AVB is happy to undertake wholesale changes to the squad. And it’s also clear that it will take time for AVB to mend a broken team. And that's what AVB inherited: a broken team, not a title-challenger.
*sigh*
It doesn't matter what he inherited, or what he's had to deal with. Playing a midget striker on his own up front with two holding midfielders at home to Norwich and leaving Adebayor and Dembele on the bench is fudging macaronic. Doing it once against West Brom was stupid enough but to not learn from his mistake is inexcusable.
I'm not denying that he's got a difficult job on his hands. But he should not get the benefit of anybody considering mitigating circumstances when judging him if he's getting the basics so horrifically wrong.
*sigh*
It doesn't matter what he inherited, or what he's had to deal with. Playing a midget striker on his own up front with two holding midfielders at home to Norwich and leaving Adebayor and Dembele on the bench is fudging macaronic. Doing it once against West Brom was stupid enough but to not learn from his mistake is inexcusable.
I'm not denying that he's got a difficult job on his hands. But he should not get the benefit of anybody considering mitigating circumstances when judging him if he's getting the basics so horrifically wrong.
We've got one of the best squads in the Premier League. To say we have a broken team is ridiculous. The exact same argument could have been made based on the 2nd half of the season before last. Arsenal could have said the same after the first half of last season. It's called having a run of good form and then a run of bad form. Having a man sent off and a deflected goal was all that prevented us from regaining 3rd and winning 4 on the bounce. If teams are judged over 12 games periods, then we could have argued that we were one of the best Prem teams ever based on our run in the first half of last season. Of course it's nonsense, as is the suggestion that we are a broken team.
All that's happened is we had a poor run, in which we had some terrible luck, followed by a poor start to the season. But I seriously doubt our rivals look at our squad and think we are anything other than one of the best in the Prem. Yes we've lost good players, but we've bought in some very good players. Fulham lost their 2 star players to us and their captain. Yet they smashed both WBA and Norwich at home. In his BBC interview Jol even mentioned how it was a new way of playing for them, yet they made it work. Arsenal lost their 2 best players and their captain. There is no point making excuses and using selective evidence to support them. We've undeniably got a squad capable of challenging the top 4. We just need a bit of luck to get that first result and then try and put a bit of a run together.
Judge AVB on what he does and not what you want him to be. It's natural that our fans want him to be hugely successful, but when he isn't don't try and convince yourselves it's necessarily justified by massively exaggerating issues that numerous other clubs are dealing with. My feeling is AVB wont be a success, based on my understanding of his and footballs history. But I don't want him to fail and I'm not going to try and explain the successes we have under him, as luck or not due to him. I'm going to judge him entirely fairly on what I see. There is no point trying to pretend that we should be improving on the Redknapp regime, as personally I think that will be hard. But likewise, there is equally no point pretending he's got a particularly tough job and that he's fixing a club that was on it's knees.
Basically we just need to wait and see. We need to be honest about what we are seeing, rather than thinking up reasons to excuse the bad or dismiss the good. At the moment I don't see much evidence of that.