The thing with AVB is...whilst results have been generally good, his personal performances have not been. Time after time he makes clearly the wrong tactical decisions and doesn't spot things that are blatantly wrong with what he's trying to do. I know there have been a lot of changes at the club over the last few months, so I wouldn't expect the players to have clicked together as fluidly as they might end up doing. But what I do expect, even if the results don't come immediately, is sensible, methodical tactics from the manager, and my frustrations with AVB is that we don't see that from him. Every game we have dropped points in this season except for perhaps Saudi Sportswashing Machine, was IMO largely down to poor decisions he made. I can forgive dropping points if you are beaten by a clearly better team, if you are screwed over by the referee, or if you're just unlucky on the day, but if you are making decisions that leave the fans going "Whaaaat thhhheeee fuuuuuckkk????" then that's not acceptable. Every manager does it from time to time, but doing it several times in the opening two months of the season is not good enough. And the thing is...it's not like he doesn't have a history of utterly ridiculous tactical mistakes even before he joined us. Just ask any Chelsea fan who watched him play Bosingwa at left-back, even when Ashley Cole was available for a big game, or when he persisted with the high defensive line when it was obvious to everyone quite early on that his defenders didn't have the pace for it.
Yes, we're in the top 4. But we were in the top 4 after 9 games in the 02/03 season, with only one point less than we have now. Guess what...we finished 10th. It's still very early days. If we finish in the top 4, then fine, that's a big achievement for AVB considering we have lost Modric, Van Der Vaart and King since last season. But the fact that we're 4th now isn't good enough to get me off his back just yet when he's making the same mistakes over and over again. Gallas has been poor on many occasions this season, he should not be starting ahead of Dawson. Livermore and Sandro together is far too defensive a partnership and invites unnecessary pressure onto us. Goalkeeper rotation is not a good thing. Dempsey is too slow to play on the wing in a system like we play. We will only see the best of Sigurdsson playing behind Adebayor in the hole. Townsend has looked sharp and dangerous when he's got game time, AVB has given him precious little of it. He also has a tendency to wait far far too long in games to make his substitutions when it's obvious to everyone else in the ground who needs to come on and for who.
Have our results been all that good anyway? We've beaten United away, that was excellent. But nobody can deny that, despite a very strong first half performance, we massively rode our luck in that game considering Ferguson's suicidal tactics in the first half, the referee getting things wrong in our favour for a change, and some wasteful finishing from them keeping their score down to just 2 goals. Even our first and third goals had huge amounts of luck about them. Fine, we were unlucky not to beat Saudi Sportswashing Machine so it's swings and roundabouts, but the fact is, we were lucky, and this is the only game we've won all season against a team outside the bottom 4. We have not yet scored more than 3 in a game, we have not won a game by more than 2 goals. And if you compare this year's results with last season's, we have fewer points after the same number of games and if you compare the corresponding fixtures swapping Reading and Southampton for Blackburn and Bolton, we are the same. Now last season was an outstanding one for us in terms of league results so if we can maintain that over the course of the season then it'll be a big achievement for AVB again...but the concern for me is, we've only been the better team in both halves of a game in a handful of games so far, by my count - Villa, Carlisle, Lazio and maybe Saudi Sportswashing Machine - so I don't see why we should expect us to maintain the level of results playing like this that we did last season when we were often obliterating teams when things were going well, and we used to usually play well even in the games we didn't win.
Those of you who only see the position in the league table and go "WE'RE 4TH! STOP COMPLAINING!" are the ones who reality will slap hardest in the face the next time we drop points. And judging by what I've seen from AVB, we will before long. Now, if he can maintain the top 4 standard over the entire season, then I will confess he's smarter than me and sees things that I don't see. But based on what I HAVE seen from him, I have really not been impressed and I do not expect us to be in the top 4 come the end of the season.
