I guess it's whe the results start going south AND we seemingly look spent I start to worry about the traing regime and the 'pressing' philosophy.
Our defence is truly terrible it seems!
What gives me hope is that Poch's second season at Southampton had them with the 6th best defence in the league, with only the top 5 with better defences IIRC.
It would be galling of we finished below Southampton and I am desperately hoping that after being beaten by Tim (shockingly again!) that he wont wont to have another case levelled against him of another manager 'getting better out of his team' etc
We shouldn't be worried about Southampton finishing above us. They're a good team. They were a good steady team, with a great management team and scouting infrastructure, that was well set up to deal with the significant squad losses with wise-reinvestment. They had an embedded club philosophy building from Adkins and improved by Poch and then improved again by Koeman, who has done very well in his first full season.
Similarly, the defeat to Villa was just one of those things. Villa didn't do anything imaginative, they did exactly what Sherwood did under us, push plenty of players forward into attacking positions and play plenty of quick, early, forward balls to a dangerous couple of attacking players. It's Sherwoods 'thing'. It works well against poor teams, or teams in poor form (including us), what it does not work well against is anyone decent or clever, as we've seen with Villa's recent poor results, including a poor result against QPR.
We have had a definate wane in form since the Liverpool game (in which we were actually pretty decent). The last four games have been pretty poor performance-wise, with us getting only 4 points. However, every team has drops in form and everyone, including Man Utd, Liverpool, Southampton, Arsenal, and even Chelsea have gone through runs of playing poorly. Look at Emirates Marketing Project right now? They've gone from looking favourites to challenge Chelsea and nailed on for top-two, to vulnerable to being pipped out of the top four because their run of form has been so horrendous. Their performances haven't been too clever either and they have a vastly superior squad to us.
We have the youngest squad in the league and an even younger first XI. Secondly, we have very few players outside the first XI that are ideal to playing Poch's philosophy and its clear to me that he joined too late to have a real influence in our summer transfer business, given how much he appears to rate the recruits we signed in the summer just gone.
It looks like this entire season appears to have been Poch feeling things out, starting with the old guard of Kaboul, Capoue, Ade, Lennon, Soldado etc before ditching them and bringing in youngsters, which resulted in a massive upturn in performance and for a while we were winning pretty much most of our games for a long period. We haven't had a real dip in form since the introduction of the youngsters but that was always going to come.
I was concerned at the beginning of the season, but I'm not overly now. I think Poch showed what his philosophy was all about this season and even if it was only for a few months, it's not to be surprised given the lack of resources suiting his philosophy.
The real test of Poch is next season, when he has had a chance to shape the squad. I'm relaxed about this season and feel the recent team-selections reveal a lot about Poch's thinking. I don't think he is happy and he's talked about changing our mentality.
I think he's put that challenge down to quite a few of the senior players and time and again it isn't been listened to. I think if he came in an said to Levy "sorry mate, but you bought a bunch of total turd in 2013 and i can't work with them", then he'd on a bad footing from day one. Instead, he's used this season to highlight just how poor these players are for the most part. Mainly in terms of mentality.
