To be fair we have only really played badly at Southampton before today. We need to rediscover the form that got us points at WBA and Swansea if we are to stay out of trouble though.
Palace, Soton and today have been our worst performances this season. To be honest as a promoted club to have only had three truly off days is pretty good.
I think assuming Long and Jelavic will start to bang them in with service like today is wishful thinking. RVP and Rooney would have struggled. Huddlestone and Livermore have obviously been excellent but does any one else feel their form has dipped recently and not just today? I am worried that, as after Christmas last season, the 3-5-2set up is starting to look more and more defensive and we have stopped being brave on the ball. Hudd and Livermore rarely got into attacking positions today and Norwich midfield looked much sharper and Elmo, after a promising first 15 minutes , basically played right back. I agree with the poster who wants Quinny back in alongside them. He should be fresh having missed so much of the season and has the ability to stitch stuff together in the opposition's half, not ours.
No really. He got everything bang on. Absolutely bang on. Everything. Never called a single thing wrong.
Kingston - I think Huddlestone has been topsy turvy all season. But the matter is he has to play, we don't have anyone else to knock the ball about like him, but he goes missing in games when we need him most and I'd have brought him off quite early in the second half today as he was clearly off the pace and not up for the scrap. Livermore I think has barely had a bad game, maybe 2 with today being one of them. He's a real engine and great all round midfielder with technical ability to be a danger at one end of the pitch and a rock at the other. He didn't look up for the scrap today either though.
Read through our match thread, if he was getting anything wrong we'd have been going apeshit about it on there. No one complained about him once, and we had the luxury of TV cameras and slow motion replays. Howard Webb had a great game today, end of.
Well to be fair its a valid point, the bottom four are averaging below a point a game for them all to get 35 would require them all to average more than a point per game(Bar Fulham who would need to average a point per game, something they aren't doing) something they have done all season, why all of a sudden would they do that now? Calling him a dipstick is a bit far when you look at them stats.... Then consider only one side last year got more than 35, Wigan got 36, so four wins and a draw. 2009/10 no-one got more than 30. 2011/12 only one side yet again got more, and that was 36. His four wins is actually sounding quite realistic. So whose the dipstick now? Oops 2008/9 no-one got more than 35 again. Only year between those dates did someone get more and they where averaging more than a point per game at this stage, so its irrelevant. Better luck next time. Also to those criticizing Howard Webb that's a bit harsh, i thought he was good today, its far to easy to moan about the refs, he may have got the odd yellow wrong but what else majorly did he get wrong? Nothing.
There's a lot of talk of dropping various players, but for me whoever on our training staff has devised the pattern of no more than ten passes before passing back to the goalie to boot to the opposition needs to go on gardening duty. You could almost set your watch by it...pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass to goalie, boot up field, opposition keeps the ball as long as they want (then repeat for 90mins).
I thought today we didn't boss the midfield as we normally do. Webb was ok but Norwich got the benefit more often than not, and we didn't. Hudds 2 yellows looked harsh, but maybe a 3 game ban will kick him up the arse to try harder. Jelavic looked good to me, seemed to put himself into decent positions. Rosie was immense today. Goal was soft and just a total lapse in concentration from the defenders. I'da taken a point before the game, was never going to be easy, and we're always going to get games like this, Im just pleased they seem fairly rare now. Majority of the other results didn't massively hurt us I thought too. We're 11th and can get back to 10th. Kick the midfield up the arse, got 2 weeks ish of training to get them all playing with Jelavic and Long, we'll be fine.
Oh what, I honestly thought you were being sarcastic. He was dreadful. I don't care what you had the benefit of.
Not time, goals. The more time without goals the worse it'll be. That really was a sitter he missed. Can people stop calling him Jelly until he's banged a few in. Whatever happened to a player earning a nickname?
Wasn't a sitter, but agree it's the exact type of goal he generally scores. If he'd had that sort of ball a couple more times today he certainly would have scored. 2 minutes into his debut I think you can forgive him for not burying it.
do you actually follow football - two yellows is a one game ban, a straight red is 3 - and our next league game is a week Tuesday against Palace so no two weeks training
