Trips to Liverpool, Stoke, Sp*rs and United to come. We have to play high flying Leicester and Chelsea at home. Throw in the Saints (whom we got trashed by) and Swansea (a bogey team in recent years), and a massive CL tie against Barcelona and you can see that we really need to start hitting top form now. Its going to be a wild ride! Hoping for some signings soon.
Take each month at a time, we have big challenges in January, and February. Let's get through the first one.
The way this topsy turvy season is going, we should take every game as it comes. There is no easy game in the league and maintaining focus is paramount.
Technically Newcastle was one of the easier games, but they played really well at our ground and made it difficult. We didn't show enough intensity and nearly cocked it up. This season has been a veritable tales of the unexpected.
Difference is Newcastle have some very good footballers, they just CBA most of the time. Villa players are both s**t AND don't care.
When Scott Sinclair is your best player you know things arer pretty bleak. The encouraging thing for me is that, aside from being top, we're due to get our injured players back in time for the run-in. Sanchez in particular will be a huge boost and if we do a sensible bit of business in January then things are looking promising.
I've been saying through December how important it was to pick up as many points as we can because starting in January we have a difficult fixture list coming up. The next few league games could have a big impact on our season. It's been a funny season and I find myself thinking the game away to Stoke will be the most difficult out of Stoke, Liverpool and Chelsea. Liverpool have been very inconsistent with there performances and have some key injuries, I'm more confident than usual going to anfield given there current situation of not having properly found there feet under klopp yet. And Chelsea despite improving since sacking Mourinho are still not clicking properly and Hazard is having injury issues. They will both still be difficult games and I'm not saying I expect us to win both, but the Stoke game stands out as the most difficult fixture, they are playing well, still have a solid core to the team but have added some really talented attacking players, add in that they always give us a good game when they are at home and it'll be a tricky game.
Sanchez and Coquelin can have a big influence on the rest of the Season. Both offer more tenacity and energy to the side. (which has been missing lately)
They will make a difference but I don't think it would have made a difference today. They just didn't respond today, instead of going out there as perspective champions and stamp their authority, they started slow and got caught out early. Problem is it's not the first time they did this against Chelsea, which shows a distinct lack of mental fortitude.
