Jol said that he that the target set was 50 points. I see this as a dream in this "transitional" season. Personally and as every season I set the target to 40 to maintain PL status. We need 19 points to this. Can you see us achieving this? With the remaining home fixtures it will be a challenge and means we have to pick points away from home... Probably you can sense I am deflated after the results of the recent days and looking for any rays of hope! Hope dies last. Come on you Whites!!!
Can we do it? Of course, anything is possible. Will we? Not a chance. This season's goal has to be to finish somewhere between 10th-15th so that we can rebuild over the summer and overhaul the squad.
Let's see: seven points from the last 11 games (since Nov 1) gives us a whopping .64 points from each game. Multiple that times the remaining 17 games, at this rate we'll have 11 points and certain relegation if things don't change for the better. And for those who think Bryan Ruiz is answer to our problems ... Ahhh, never mind. I'm not sure anyone's to blame, but this is what happens when three crucial players leave your team. Mo made a nice profit selling Dempsey and Dembele; I think survival is going to cost him all of that and more once the window opens.
i said in august we would finish 12th, we need to start winning soon, i am sure we will beat chelsea and liverpool at home, it could be squeaky bum time
I'm not sure I ever said Ruiz was 'the answer', but his absence has certainly been the problem. We need to get the right combination in central midfield, to give him and Berbatov a platform, and we need better cover for key players being absent, but we're a better team than our current (awful) run of results suggests.
I think that should read 'A problem' rather than THE problem. Ruiz played yesterday and against Southampton, we won neither. Jol has now moved on from his 'We have Ruiz out' excuse to 'We have Diarra out'. Who will it be next week if Diarra comes back? Simon Davies? You say Ruiz was the problem behind our bad run of form, then you go onto state that the problem is that we need cover for key players? So which one is it? Is it the fact that Ruiz was out injured, or because we only have dross to replace him with?
Not really. Ruiz being out could be the problem, but we could still have decent back ups to step in and take his place. For example, Diarra being out has been a problem, but because Sidwell has come in and performed well, then it doesn't become much of a problem. The problem with the Ruiz injury isn't that he got injured, it's that we have no replacement.
(Sigh). Why so pedantic and aggressive, Bandit? I meant that Ruiz's absence was the problem because it left us lacking someone with an eye for a pass to open up a defence, so in that regard the lack of suitable cover is all part and parcel of the same problem. That's what has been missing from the team while he's been injured. We all used to moan about how we never looked the same side going forward without Murphy. Well, Ruiz is the new Murphy, albeit in a different part of the pitch. The problem is that we lack a creative playmaker without him. That isn't the only thing that needs improving in our side, but it's the one which goes away when he's available. And when it goes away, we are a good side who will get better results than we have on the recent awful run.
One my famous sayings at the beginning of each season is 'Win most of our home games against the bottom 14 clubs and we will be Ok' This for me still stands. Wigan QPR Reading need to be won. But this season is starting to remind me of Tigana's last season, where we just couldn't get out of a rut, hopefully by the beginning of March we will have picked points from our home games to be able to stay out a last minute struggle.
I just posted about this in the "Ambitions" thread, but to sum it up I think we can get the points, I don't think we'll need to and I don't think we'll get relegated. There are too many other teams performing badly for me, I think our early points gain might carry us through. Also if Jol said "50 points" I'm assuming we still had Dembele when he said that? He's not seemed to have such excessive confidence since.
Jol may have targeted 50 points which might be ambitious now, but at least it is more realistic than Brendan Roger's prediction a few weeks ago when we said Liverpool would finish 2nd - that one still makes me chuckle. I am not worried in the slightest about relegation. We will pick up at some point - have absolute no doubt.
