Some decent responses but as with every other thread we just keep going back to our bad luck and bad refereeing decisions.
Yes, we were down to 10 men against Villa and that was because we had no cover for our full backs and had to play a poor LW at LB. Hopelessly out of his depth in previous games against Blackburn and Bolton (i said he would definitely cost us after the Bolton game and got criticised for it by some) he should have been nowhere the starting line-up.
The appalling January window was the reason why he was playing. We loaned out good pros that could only have filled in at LB (three of the actually) and never replaced them like for like.We should have kept all our squad for the vital and very demanding run-in AND added to the squad, we did neither.
Harry must take responsibility for this.
We ran our players into the ground becuase of our lack of squad depth. Walker, Kaboul,Parker,Bale,Ekotto are all now injured and two and possibly three of those will now miss the Euros.
Chelsea with half a team missing and most of their defence out still managed to put out a team that looked strong on paper in the last few games. Ferreira and Bosingwa might not be great but they are very decent squad players for cover.
I could have made a thread only about our bad luck,it's all true, we got 'foyed' many times, we conceded more late goals than we scored (is that bad luck or bad play?). We had near misses, hit the woodwork often and keepers performed heroics. Is that bad luck or just bad finishing?
Ultimately we did have a lot of bad luck but some was self-induced.
Emirates Marketing Project and Chelsea cleaned up, The goons got CL, So did Cheatski even though they finished 6th and became the first London club to win the CL, on top of all that they denied us a place.
QPR stayed up, i wanted them to get relegated.
West Ham and their inferiority complex are back in the PL via the play offs thanks to a last minute goal.
Even my second/ local team Southend missed out on promotion by one point. An abandoned game due to floodlight failure against Aldershot when leading comfortably mid-way through the second half ultimately cost Southend promotion as the when the game was replayed some months later,Aldershot by this time in red hot form won the game.
Southend then lost in the play-offs to Crewe , a team they had beaten twice in the league!
As the thread title said......a really horrible football year but i don't feel half as tinkled off about it all as i did a couple of days ago.