Man city - good start and very unlucky. Wigan- Poor performance unacceptable. Man Utd- unlucky poor subs cost us. Arsenal- Shocking Ason Villa- Poor first half, Amazing second half. Everton- Poor performance no passion shown. Fulham- average performance lucky to escape with a draw. West Ham- Unacceptable. Spurs- Shocking first half, dominated second half. West Brom. Abysmal defensive showing. This is my opinion on this season so far and apart from the 2 manchester games which we ended up losing and 2 second half performances we have been pretty poor this season. Now i would say this is more a lack of passion/ability from the players than down to adkins. However the question i ask myself is, Is it not Nigels job to get the best out of his players and to demand 100% every single minute they are on the field? If the players arn't delivering every game like they did 2nd half against Villa or at least getting close to that standard then why arn't they? All i can put it down to is the players have lost a bit of belief in Adkins, and he doesn't seem able to get anymore out of them. In summary the performances so far for me have not been what i was hoping for, but most worrying the lack of effort and passion from the players really concerns me.
I think that is a fair appraisal of our season so far. I don't have any answers to your question about why the morale seems low. However, what seems strange is the timing of the dip, you would expect us to be at rock bottom after getting demolished at Arsenal. Instead we delivered our best performance of the season immediately afterwards, then against Everton we looked flat and don't seem to have recovered since. Odd.
Bit harsh. Thought our first half against Fulham was excellent! Something needs to change. But not the manager!
It is going to take some adjustment to go from winning easily to getting badly beaten. Against Everton we were stuffed by a team who only really played at full stretch for the 15-20 minutes it took for them to score their goals. As you say, it has been downhill ever since. Our inability to turn good possession into goal chances worries me as much as anything else, and that otherwise good performance against Fulham was as much an expression of this as any game. They just need a couple of good results, but where are these 3 clubs that we need to finish below us? They are getting difficult to spot.
I disagree with your comment on manure..it wasn't poor subs that cost us, it was van persie. He won that game single handed - the git!
He was truly on song that day. Not really shone like that since, either. Our luck's been out all season. It's fine margins at this level. For instance, if Fonte hadn't slipped just before clearing off the line vs Spurs, he wouldn't have scooped it straight to Dempsey. 1-0 at half time and we'd still have been in that game. Trouble is, when you're luck's out it's easy to stop believing that it'll ever change. Heads go down, mistakes pile up, and hope ebbs away.
Couldn't agree more - van persie was on a different planet on the day we played manure, arse were on a different planet when we played them - ever everton played out of their socks. Our luck has to turn sooner or later surely....this weekend perhaps?
To some extent, it's a confidence thing. Win a game or two, even if we fluke it (and I think we all agree we due a bit of good luck) and the boys'll put in a better performance. As fans we need to be the twelfth man at home to infuse the team with energy and belief.
we were 2-1 up with 10 minutes to go we made 2 subs and then lost the plot in midfield which allowed scholes to do what he's always done. I agree van persie was good but up untill then we were coping with him.
Looking sympathetically from the outside, my diagnosis of your problems at the moment is "too many new ("better") players introduced too quickly into a formerly tight-knit and successful squad". As I said a while back on another thread, having a big pot of money available for team strengthening in the summer was probably a bad thing. If you had had a maximum of, say £10M, to spend on team strengthening, the question would have been "We basically have to go with what we've already got, so what are the one or two priority additions that would give maximum help to our current squad?" Instead, you have looked to bring in as many notionally "better quality" players as you could afford, amounting in effect to half a new team. Of those coming in, only Clyne has slotted easily into the side. As a result your momentum from the last two seasons has been lost, and your pattern of play disrupted (one consequence being that, in seeking greater defensive solidity, you have sacrificed attacking potency and now have the worst of all worlds, a still rising goals against total, and fewer goals for to compensate). If you ask where the responsibility for this predicament lies, I would say more with Cortese than Adkins. The solution? Time -- rather as Mark Hughes keeps repeating in an even more extreme yet nevertheless similar situation at QPR.
Most pundits said at the time that there probably isn't a team in the world who could have handled van persie that day for the full 90 minutes plus manure time - I tend to agree with them. Not anyone's fault - just an unbelievable player
Don't want to go back down that route but it wasn't Van persie apart from his early goal he did ok but nothing amazing untill scholes came on and we made our changes to allow scholes the space. We were 2-1 up and bought on 3 attacking players in jrod, mayuka and i think it was guly. To be fair its all we had on the bench that day which again comes back to Adkins not selecting the right squad.
The subs were to blame because we were on top at the time and could have gone on to score a third but the subs disrupted the team and as a result United took charge.
He could not change a defender as all he had on the bench was ****, could not take Morgan off so the only option was fresh legs up front maybe hoping to take the pressure off the defence. Alas a couple of errors then happened that cost us the game
If Morgan can reproduce his Utd and City performances against teams without "Man" in their name, I'm sure we will pick up some points.
But why did he take Lambert off so early when he was causing so many problems? And don't give me the bollocks that he was knackered. If he had stayed on the pitch for 5/10 minutes more we could have scored again. Taking him off on 67 minutes was too early.
everyone says he was knackared he wasn't neither was puncheon or lallana they were all subbed within 5 minutes of each other and we completely lost our shape. Without a doubt it was our subs that cost us that game.
