Rather than thinking far ahead (I'd guess prompted by some stupid question) Bruce needs to concentrate on simply winning again.
Our last two games: Bolton away and Rotherham at home. Boro's: Birmingham away and Brighton at home. Burnley's: QPR at home and Charlton away. Brighton's: Derby at home and Middlesbrough away.
Gee, home draw with side placed 21st in table. One win in 5 league games, 2 goals scored. Baffling line ups, un co-ordinated midfield. £92 million minimum for all clubs in the PL next season. Potential for growth and self sustaining club without an over-reliance on mental owners. A side looking nothing like getting promoted, manager can't work out what the problem is, under performing expensive players. Poodling my arse. People are right to be worried. Unless of course you enjoy 2nd tier mediocrity, in which case this barren spell must be music to your ears. People have a right to criticise, we might be 3rd and two points from automatic promotion, but it's easy to see why people would be concerned, especially when all the other teams are winning games. People would sleep a lot easier if we won games and stopped relying on other teams; I don't think it's too much to ask for a team costing the better part of £40 million to beat Mk ****ing Dons, a team who last season were in League 1.
What was baffling? Mo's an experienced player who's played there plenty before. Akpom played, you've been asking for him a lot. Clucas has played CM a few times for us. You wanted Hayden in, you got it. He was poor. Beat Qpr, drew with Boro and Cardiff and beat Derby recently. They're no mugs.
Baffling was playing a CM (yes he's played out wide before, but he's not a winger is he? He made hundreds of appearances as a CM and it's where he plays for Senegal) wide and a left winger in CM. Then, ending the game with 4 strikers on the pitch, no shape and Davies careening around up front. I didn't think Hayden was that bad, that's opinion of course. Just because these lads have played a few games in that postion doesn't make them a natural. Supppose that makes Koren and Garcia strikers because our managers were daft enough to play them there more than once? When the alternative is an out of form Meyler or Huddlestone (who had a decent game against Arsenal I thought, but Hayden was the natural choice), Bruce made the right choice there, that wasn't the baffling bit. I don't care who they've beaten, they're 21st in the league, they're ****, as evidenced yesterday. We made them look better than they are, which isn't very good anyway; if there was a definition of a mug's team, a team consisting entirely of mugs, it'd be them. Face it, we aren't doing enough. If this is all we have left in the tank then forget promotion, it isn't going to happen. Gone are the days when other teams will do us a favour, it's up to us to seal our own destiny and based on the last fortnight, it isn't looking good. What do you change? Do you change anything at all and hope that it all comes good by itself? This is why fans are getting annoyed, booing and the like (as much as I hate booing, I could see why people did and there were A LOT of people booing) because it's not good enough. As fans we are helpless spectators to the sport, so if we can't physically change the outcome on the pitch, we can at least voice our displeasure when a team made up of internationals fails to beat a pisspot franchise team from Milton Keynes.
Well their big excuse last season was our amount of injuries. Very few injuries this season, so I wonder what their excuse will be this off-season if we don't go up?
You can't expect the likes of Hayden to be fully firing after one match in weeks, he needs a run of games.
