Re: ***The Official AVB Discussion Thread***
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.
OK, well my first point in response to this was that my point still stands. I wasn't making a point stating "we've never played ok in games", my point was we've not been totally dominant from start to finish and put teams to the sword by putting a few goals past them. Yes, every team has a 'spell' in a game, but my point about the Villa match was that for all our possession etc, Villa were always in the game up until our 2nd. I.e. it was not a comfortable performance. I've seen several times this season that teams like Chelsea, Emirates Marketing Project, Liverpool, Arsenal, get 2 or 3-0 up early in a game and its game-over. They ruthlessly batter teams and end up winning 4, 5, 6 goals. They make the opposition chase shadows and its a marker put down to other teams in the division. "We're a top team, if you so much as turn up to play us an ounce under your full potential, we will steam-roller you". We very rarely, if ever, do that under AVB. Ok, actually, Villa away last season, we won 4-0. That was probably a good example. But they're few and far between, whereas, say for example, Harry's teams were always good for dishing out at least 3 or 4 utter hidings a season.
No matter how dominate you are in possession, if you don't put teams away, they're always in the game. They don't put their heads down and give up like you see some of the poorer teams do when they go 2 or 3 goals down. If you are relying on single goals or penalties to win you games, or screamers from Bale, then you're always giving the opposition a chance, you're keeping them focused on the game, you're making yourself work hard to preserve the points. No wonder the likes of Paulinho are looking so knackered, a whole first season of trying to preserve 0-0 and 1-0 scorelines against teams that still have their tails up are going to take their toll, surely?
Now, i'll move onto my own analysis of the games above, also putting my (possibly biased), but IMO no less valid slant on them. I'm feeling very negative about Spurs just now, so of course i'm looking at everything from a glass-half-empty point of view, whereas obviously you are looking for the positives in every performance. The reality is possibly in between the two view-points, but to me that doesn't make for much better reading than my own.
Palace away - well, a point against Spurs is a good point for Palace, they didn't commit any bodies forward, they allowed us the ball while we weren't threatening them with it and we did dominate possession infront of them for large periods of the game. THey were happy to sit encamped around their penalty area, so while we had a lot of "pressure" in terms of posession of the ball around their box, how many chances did we create? I think Chadli missed a good one admittedly and Sig drew a couple of good saves from outside the box, however Palace set out to grind out a nil-nil and to be fair they should have got it. The penalty call was very harsh IMO and in the opinion of most neutrals, with Palace having a good case for it to be called "ball to hand", rather than "hand to ball". So yes, we dominated possession, but didn't really look like scoring and they were clearly happy for us to pass it around their box as they were delighted with a 0-0 draw.
Swansea home - Yes, we were 'clearly the better team' in terms of possession. I actually think we did fairly ok in this game, but again looked toothless upfront apart from Townsend and the odd run from Paulinho. We had a lot of possession, but again a lot of it was passing around Swansea on the edge of their box. In the end, we got a penalty that we probably deserved (at least, Townsend had a better shout in the first half that wasn't given). But we still relied on a penalty to win the game. I don't have as many issues regarding this performance as some of others, but this kind of 'eeked out win when not playing great' is the kind of performance that is talked about as being an example of a title challenger winning while not playing well, but for us its one of our better peformances of the season, and that is worrying.
Arsenal - We did have a lot of the ball, but didn't threaten. It was a strange game as our reputation from the summer spending seemed to proeed us and Arsenal were content to park the bus and defend their 1-0 lead once they got it. We couldn't and didn't look like breaking them down. So again, we had a lot of the ball against a team that had no interest in attacking us from quite early on in the game. Not a disaster admittedly, and by this point in the season clearly I didn't have the concerns I did now and was hopeful that we were still finding our feet and would get better.
Cardiff away - It's ok saying we should have won 4-0, but we didn't. We didn't score and for all their keeper made a lot of saves, many were long-range shots or shots hit far too close to him. It certainly wasn't a Krul for Saudi Sportswashing Machine display and we were pretty fortunate to win the game. We certainly didn't utterly dominate in the sense I would expect us to at least a few times a season. It was a decent display and on the balance of course our winner was deserved, but again it was against a very poor team who were content with a 0-0 draw and so did not attack us at all, and we almost failed to beat them. Therefore, i bet they were thinking after the game that their game strategy almost paid off and they came away feeling hard done-by!
Norwich - I don't believe this was a great performance, a great performance to me is smashing Wigan 9-1 or Saudi Sportswashing Machine 5-0 or (being fair to AVB and avoiding this appear to turn into a Harry v AVB thing) the first half versus Man U at OT last season. It was a competent performance where we comfortably beat one of the poorest teams in the division at home. Again, they didn't attempt to attack us whatsoever, coming for the point. Luckily , Eriksen played well and created a couple of good chances for one of the few players in our team I feel confident of converting them (Sigurdsson).
Chelsea - I agree with your assessment of the game overall, but to say Defoe could have won it at the end doesn't really do the Chelsea performance and the concerning nature of our own performance in teh 2nd half justice. For me this was the first signs of the Emirates Marketing Project/West Ham performance coming, in that the amount of chances Chelsea created in the 2nd half with simple balls over the top of our high-defence was ridiculous. How they didn't end up battering us I will never know, they missed so many chances. We completely fell away in this game as Mourinho clearly worked out our weaknesses at half time and instructed his team to attack us more and in a more direct fashion.
West Ham - well we might have got away with it the game before, but West Ham and big Sam clearly watched the Chelsea game as they decided not to sit back, but to have a go and in a direct way. They completely wiped the floor with us in the end, which is embarissing when you consider the quality of the team we were facing.
Villa - We were not by far the better team. As I keep saying, passing the ball sideways against a team that would be delighted with a point and doesn't care to attack us much doesn't to me doesn't wash as a great performance. It was a pretty even game until we scored a fluke, then we became dominant, without creating anything, they brought on Benteke and went direct, they created all sorts of mayhem before we picked them off on the break. Their heads then went down and we saw out the game comfortably, I don't honestly regard this performance as anything other than another example a club of our quality should point to as "not our best performance of the season, but we ground out the win without playing well". Again, the fact that some point to this game as an example of one of our better displays is highly alarming.
Hull - Hull sat back, but decided to have a go on the break. How they didn't score from one of their numerous counter-attacks I don't know. They were happy to let us pass it sideways, and around and weren't interested in coming out until our passing broke down. When they did, it was one ball over the top and they seemed to be almost through on Lloris every single time! We lucked-out with a dodgy penalty call (see Palace) and won the game with Steve Bruce rightly very aggrieved.
Everton - Ok, I admit it, this was an acceptable performance, if the rest of our games weren't so poor and it was just an example of grinding out a good point away against a tough side, i wouldn't have a problem with it. In context of the rest of our games though, our inability to create anything, particularly with our possession domination of the first half is concerning.
Saudi Sportswashing Machine - Again, Saudi Sportswashing Machine were happy for us to have the ball and hit us with direct counter-attacks. Each time they attacked we looked like conceeding. They could and should have been 3-0 up at half time, had they been so, i doubt we'd have seen the performance we did in the 2nd half, but credit where its due, we got our best half of the season against them. We were very unlucky and for the first time this season created numerous good chances. Its only frustrating that this game highlighted our ability to do so, but that we often don't! We paid the price for our first-half failings as we couldn't finish one of our numerous chances, often giving the admittedly excellent Krul a chance to make the saves that he did do!
Emirates Marketing Project - The season hits a new low but to be honest, the Chelsea game in the 2nd half could easily have turned into a rout of these proportions and I think this defeat has been coming for a while as we have been shown to be very vulnerable to the direct through-ball/counter attack time and agin this season when teams have chosen to go at us.
So I think, when you look at that, then the season hasn't actually been as positive as our league position and points tally (only 2 points off 4th after all) would paint out and I would say we have done extremely well out of results this season and refereeing decisions, given the actual level of the performances.
To me, pointing to displays like beating Norwich 2-0 and Aston Villa 2-0 as being our best performances of the season and "great performances" highlights just how low our performances and expectations have dropped from when Redknapp was in charge when we probably would have punished the kind of lack-lustre display Norwich put in at WHL by giving them the complete and utter hiding they deserved!
I mean I bet their fans said "oh well, 2-0 away at WHL isn't that bad, its quite a respectable result really".
