There's been no mention of Benny being injured that I've seen but he missed out on the bench too so he must've picked up an injury in the warm up as he was Tweeting about looking forward to the match earlier.
Completely agree with you Ghoddle I can't bear to watch football much at the moment! I would love a win so much and it would make things look a whole lot better. Defeat would be disastrous and AVB would be under severe pressure. I wouldn't be one of those saying get rid after 4 games but the media frenzy will go into overdrive. If Defoe is not effective today surely it puts the issue of him being lone striker particularly away from home to bed once and for all. Please prove me wrong! COYS
All credit for this goes to Ewan Roberts, who originally wrote and posted it. It's a great article on AVB. Many people have said that all AVB had to do to succeed was continue the good work done by Redknapp and build upon healthy foundations. But that’s just not the case. Totally ignoring the players we’ve lost for a moment, AVB’s having to repair rotten foundations, re-build the soul of the team, boost confidence and morale, get a losing team back to winning ways. Our form now is a hangover from our form at the end of last season. AVB was given a team that was rock bottom in so many respects. We may have finished fourth, but that did not adequately represent just how truly awful we’d been in 2012. If you take the second half of our season – the second set of 19 games – we won just seven matches. A win percentage of just 36%...and three of those wins (none of which were convincing) came in our final four games. If the league existed just over that period of time we’d have been in 9th position, behind Wigan, Fulham, Everton and the usual suspects. Those figures include an additional game for us compared to all the other sides (the postponed Everton match @ WHL, because of the riots). If those three points are discounted, we drop to 11th place. There’s been lots of people saying “mid-table here we come” and such, well mid-table’s been beckoning for a while. We’ve had the form of a mid-table side for 5 months prior to AVB’s arrival. This isn’t his fault, our poor early season form isn’t exclusively of his doing. If you look at the nine game run from the 5-2 loss at the Emirates in February until the 1-0 loss to QPR in April – a period that represents almost a quarter of the season – we were 19th in the form guide. Played 9, won 1, drew 3, lost 5. 6 points from a possible 27. Goals scored = 9, goals conceded = 14. 0.67 ppg. Only Wolves were worse off. Only two sides (Wolves and Norwich) conceded more goals. Five teams conceded five goals twice or more in a single game in the league last year, and we were one of them. Norwich, QPR, Bolton and ourselves conceded five goals twice, Wolves conceded five goals three times. Two of the five teams are now in the Championship. We’ve been crap for a while. Not only is AVB having to prepare for life after King, Modric and van der Vaart, he’s also having to turn around the fortunes of a club that has been in a six month slump. Frankly, given the form of the side it’s easy to see why AVB is happy to undertake wholesale changes to the squad. And it’s also clear that it will take time for AVB to mend a broken team. And that's what AVB inherited: a broken team, not a title-challenger.
Good article and very fair. To be honest I hadn't looked at it like that. Conversely though with the team and squad we have now, we should be beating teams like Reading whatever our form towards the end of last season.
At least we're not playing two holding midfielders, but Assou-Ekotto's omission is an odd one, isn't it? I'd suggest that he's got one eye on Lazio, but surely the Cameroonian would still make the bench if that were the case.
