look spurs TALK BIG but are not offering the wages! lets not please beleive they would have moutinho, hazard and the world sun and moon in their team had they got CL. They don't pay any more than FSG do. simple. moutinho would have joined if they offered him the money... hazard was never going anywhere but chelsea not even city enticed him..... the carling cup is IMPORTANT.... hodgson found how when he messed it up as it heaped pressure after more pressure on him... rodgers doens't need the added pressure of a legaue cup losss now.. cos frankly those saying they wouldn't mind are in the minority and the minute we lose the press will be all over him even more fans will be up in arms etc etc. do we really think resting 3/4 players so they play once a week is the answer? I think getting a scrappy 1-0 win in this comp will gvie us a little boost just like beating yuong boys (lucky there mind) did. the rest did nobody any good v utd did it? we stil lost 3 players to injury and we still lost to sloppy goals we let happen to us... again. go win the game, get the team sorted out and play properly.
What good idd a CC win do us? We won a trophy and instead of filling the players with a winning attitude we slumped to 8th after being 3 points off fourth. Not much good it seems.
Not saying don't go out to lose it but think the league at the moment is just our number 1 proirity, we have to get much closer to 4th and get at least up the league table a bit more. We got the monkey off our back of not won anything in however many years. 4th is important, everyone knows that.
I see the point and I know winning cups is good ( duh I know) but getting fourth allows us to be able to have the revenue, expenditure, and pull to get some of the best out there so instead of fighting for CC and FA cups, we can ( hopefully) be challanging for CL and the prem title.
I keep seeing the comment about Hodgson losing in the League Cup which set is downfall rolling. There is one big difference between that game and the match that is currently facing Brendan...Northampton are not as good as WBA! I'm not saying we WBA are unbeatable but it is a lot more respectable to go out against a fellow Premiership team than it is a League Two side!
league is always the "bread and butter" and thats the lfc way but we never didn't care about a cup. Every real LFC manager knew the league was the thing and winning it was the ultimate goal but its not about managers right now.... i think this is about fans thinking now we can play a bad team and if we lose no biggie. every time we've lost i've then seen the majority of fans generally going mad we did... but the majority go mad every time we lose anyway i guess.
I am agreeing with just about everything you're saying on this thread. It is not a case of wanting us to lose, far from it. It is about being realistic and looking beyond this one game, looking beyond the League cup. Of course we want to win the trophy, we all want to win every trophy! But the priority should be the league, a good league finish would encourage players to join more than a trophy nowadays. However, the other side of looking at it would be, are we going to get a top four finish? IMO, no we aren't. So would a cup win be such a bad thing then? Obviously not (when is a cup win ever bad?). I'd still rather win the FA Cup or Europa League over the League Cup, we saw last year what can happen after a cup win in mid-season
This ^^ I was thinking the same thing, we have no chance of getting CL unless we get someone in January who can score shed loads of goals for us. Until then I suppose we just hope we can stay up with the best of them and hope to have a good run in the COC cup and Europe.
Winning domestic cups is good in terms of short term success - we get to go to Wembley, more revenue up front. Finishing in top 4 equals long term success - gives you greater revenue and access to the better players which enable you to build a squad to compete on all fronts going forward. Winning the Carling Cup was a great feeling and it gives me ammo to shoot down Arsenal fans!
In terms of this year, I hope we get somewhere close to 6th and either a long FA cup run or a long Europa run ( For soem reason I prefer the Europa run). Just trying to be realistic with it all. I know 4th will be a really tough ask but that should be what we have to aim for at the minimum should we want to improve and start getting back to the top.
Do you not think it will be too late come January? I do, I think we will be too far behind. Look at Arsenal last year, they had a poor start but RVP had started banging them in by the end of October (possibly earlier?) and they only got into the top four in the closing stages of the season. They had a full two months on what we could possibly hope and thats assuming however (if) we get hits the ground running and scores like RVP did!
That's a good point. It's so frustrating that we let Carroll go and didn't replace him. Very bad move on the owners part. What realistic targets would want to come to us though?
Just thought I would post a little message here informing everyone that the match thread shall be up in the coming hours. Haven't had the chance to get it up any earlier i'm afraid!