Re: ***The Official AVB Discussion Thread***
You see, all I said was "i thought", whereas you're stating your own opinion as fact. I did think we were fortunate in that game. It was an even contents with neither side creating anything until Townsend scored a fluke. To be fair we did enter a dominate spell in the game, but then they brought on Benteke and I thought they got on top then, until we hit them on the break. So my point was it wasn't a start-to-finish dominate performance, like the poster made out. Infact, if you fish out the official match thread on here, the amount of moaning like "we are terrible" before we score and then get the 2nd tells you all you need to know about the quality of performance in the game.
Agree with Billy - the amount of times you've completely denigrated our performances when they actually have been nowhere near as bad as you've said has made your arguments harder to take. I thought you made a really good post a page or so back that was hard to disagree with but according to you some of our performances mean our season isn't 'we played well that game'...it becomes 'the opposition had a good spell...which means we didn't play well' which is just nonsense. Most of the time every team will have a good spell in the match. Even we did against City. Doesn't mean City's victory was any less convincing. It's the Premier League.
Games this season we've played very well in: Palace - Siggy and Defoe missed as clear chances as they will get all season, and Chadli missed a pretty easy header but I won't count that as too clear. We could have easily won that game 3/4-0 because they never once made it look like we were in any danger - but you're analysis is 'we needed a lucky penalty'. We didn't, we had many more chances.
Swansea - I thought we were clearly the better team here. We looked more fluid than most other games at home to similar level teams last season. Not the best performance ever but in the first home game following pre-season it was certainly encouraging. The penalty we got was fairly lucky but we had a clear one turned down too, plus a few other good chances. Swansea never threatened us.
Arsenal - good possession but didn't create much. They are good this season. It can happen. Teams will play a lot worse.
Cardiff away - utter domination. Again we should have won that 4-0. We didn't 'need extra time', we simply battled until the end and fully deserved it.
Norwich - great performance. We didn't score more than 2 but it doesn't take away from the fact our movement and passing was excellent.
Chelsea - good first half, bad second half. Could have won it at the end with Defoe.
West Ham - pretty awful.
Villa - we were by far the better team. They had a spell because most home teams in this league will at some point. But I think beyond one Benteke header we could have racked up far more than 2 goals by the end of it.
Hull - bad performance. Not clicking.
Everton - good performance in terms of stopping them playing - which they have shown they are capable of doing - but needed to feed Soldado better. Still, teams will play a lot worse than we did on their ground.
Saudi Sportswashing Machine - bad first half but in terms of chance creation one of our best performances in the second half. Bad luck and good goalkeeping denied us the points.
Emirates Marketing Project - awful, awful, awful.
I think if you look at it like that, the season so far hasn't been as terrible as you say. But what you have been doing is painting games that are mostly positive in to overwhelming negatives. It makes it harder to have a rational discussion.