How does the start to this season differ from last - discuss

Look forward to hearing the various views

 

Better team on paper, but worse results, and that's a fact.

 

Last season i wasn't confident we would turn it around and never really felt like our football was good enough. This season although disappointing so far I do think its only a mstter of time before the results come.

 

How much time? At this rate we'll be saying in November that we're too good to go down.

 

I'm fairly sure the current Manager and his entourage are on a much bigger wage than the last manager.

 

The answer is that we conceded 5 fewer goals after 7 games last season, scored 3 more, and (if all games were league fixtures) picked up 3 more points. Yeah, apples with apples it ain't for sure, but tells you something.

First 7 games of this season (all competitions):
Swansea (H) L 0-5
Norwich (A) D 1-1
Walsall (H) W 3-0
Man City (A) L 1-3
Chelsea (H) D 0-0
Spurs (A) L 1-2
Reading (H) L 2-3
Total F8, A 14 Pts (if all were league games) 5

First 7 games last season (all competitions):
Bolton (H) L 0-4
Everton (A) W 1-0
Rochdale (H) L 0-2
Wigan (A) L 0-2
Newcastle (H) D 0-0
Wolves (A) W 3-0
Aston Villa (H) 1-1
Total F5, A 9 Pts (if all were league games) 8

 

Last season we played Newcastle off the park and got a 0 0 and stuffed Wolves away.
They were good performances. Tonight was hopeless.

 

Start of last season we had a really good Manager who I think we should of held onto. This season we have a Manager who kept us up just, but has not succeeded yet in getting us away from the bottom 3 to 5 in about 25 games, despite huge funding to purchase in 2 windows. I'd really like to see us keeping one good manager for seasons not just months, but I can't see that Hughes can be judged a good manager if we are still around the bottom 3 mid- November. I think he should get til then, but if we bring in Harry tomorrow, MH's over-cautious approach won't have me crying too much about it.

 

Spot on.

But, once again, getting knocked out of the League Cup might be a blessing in disguise as it was for us when we made promotion that season, as we were out of both cups and were therefore able to focus on the league and we went up.
This will give us some breaks in the schedule and allow for some rest and healing for the players.
I'm not going to say that we should just forget the FA Cup and get knocked out of that as well so we can focus on gelling the team for the league, as it would bode for a rather boring season overall to just play for the league, but it may not be such as bad idea.