Difficult spot for Cork and Yoshida, who have scarcely played and end up facing a team that counters as incisively as Villa can. But wow, did they ever come up well short of demonstrating that they deserve more.
Before the panic, there is just no chance you'll get many of those types of games. Every (seldom) shot on target results in a goal. We dominated that and at least 99 times out of 100 we would come away with 3 points. However, saying that, anybody that still thinks Corky is as good, or even better, than Wanyama needs their heads examined. Also, I'd rather have a Jos than a Yosh. A daft night. Now let's make this week daft and beat Manchester City.
Well that certainly gave us more of an idea as to what we want from the January window. We can't rely on our squad players. Good performance for the most part, but largely thrown away by Yoshida and Cork.
Honestly I think he got most of the decisions correct tonight, people are just peeved because we really should not have lost tonight. But the truth is we lack players who make runs into the box and we don't get enough crosses in. We had so much possession but a lot of it was in front of their defence. I think Pochettino has to take some of the blame for chucking Yoshida in when we were already without Schneiderlin and Boruc.
In all honesty, we knew our squad players aren't up to, or for, it from the utterly abject performances in the cup.
Taking stock, we need another player who can slot in at CB and play a bit at one of the fullback spots. Whether it's rust or simply the contrast to the Fonte/Lovren partnership, Maya had a woeful game. I'm not going to give up on Cork, given his play of last season, but we're going to need to find ways and times to get him on the pitch so that he looks like a footballer when the need arises, because he was stunningly off the pace tonight. And frankly, while Gazzaniga didn't have much to do, he didn't exactly cover himself in glory, either...needs to be far quicker off his line with the style we play, and he neither contested Agbonlahor nor was he in any position to disrupt Kozak. This was always the danger; we had a largely settled lineup, and we've had a slew of injuries all at once. Either the squad players need to step up in a big way, or we need to find some new additions.
That just wasn't good enough. The attack didn't deserve to be on the losing side, but the defence did. Was noticeable that we lost an edge when Wanyama went off. Cork without Schneiderlin did not impress me in the slightest.
