With Liverpool and Chelsea coming up we NEEDED to get something today. I'm absolutely shocked that we didn't. QPR are ****, and today we were even worse. Doesn't really put us in a great position now. I think we'd be lucky with 3 points from the next 3 games.
Nothing to be positive about here I'm afraid. If we're going to have just one poor performance it has to be against someone we aren't counting on beating. There are only so many "winnable" games left.
So here's how i see things. We came to the Premier League playing high tempo pressing football. And although we came close against the big teams we lost far too many games far too easily. Adkins saw what was happening and changed things about and we started to win, or at least became hard to beat. Poch comes in and puts us right back to how we were playing at the start of the season. For me the pressing game works against teams that are willing to attack, it does not work against teams who sit back and play on the break. Despite all of our possession it always looked like QPR who were more likely to score, as we were so often caught out of position.
Positives: JRod is improving hugely, Gaston looked better and it was good to have Fonte back. Nobody else turned up. Schneiderlin made one incredible tackle but him and Cork just had no creativity today, it seemed like it was always going backwards.
I suspect that I am not alone in feeling disappointed but not surprised. There is little point commenting on the performance of individuals or the team overall; Redknapp was always going to come out on top today. It was just one of those "inevitables" that football consistently delivers. I'm just glad I didn't sink low enough to take the dirty money on offer at 5/1 before kick off.
Guys. Easy up a bit. We've played very well in every game under Pochettino, other than an average performance vs Newcastle and a very poor one in this game. We will be fine.
No we wouldn't have, the team did this crap under him as well. The players we have specially our wingers and forwards aren't clinical enough.
Precisely this. Anybody would think we won every game comfortably with Nigel. We've had one genuinely poor game under Poche which he'll learn from for sure.
Don't think Adkins would have made a difference. It wasn't down to bad tactics or lack of motivation. Defense was just awful and could not make simple plays. They had the same problems when Adkins was here. They just aren't very good.
This goes back to January and getting Poch in just when we needed to be bolstering our defence instead. I've never felt like we would be in great danger of relegation all season - until now.
The same crap was happening when Adkins changed it as well. Doesn't matter what tactics you play when we need about 15 shots to score one goal.
Sorry but the tactics were atrocious. We pressed when we shouldn't have, leaving Rémy and others up against one man too often, we played too many long balls in Samba's direction and we somehow managed to not get enough people forward and leave ourselves short at the back. The defence looked worse because they were always stretched. No hint of a plan B when it was obvious our tactics weren't working. I think Itchen Masack is right, this is how we played at the start of the season, and eventually Adkins figured out what was going wrong, now it seems like we're back at square one. Pochettino needs to have a serious think I'm afraid because his idea of simply pressing high and letting the rest take care of itself is not working.
There was some lovely interaction up front which led to a few chances, but as usual we couldn't finish. But that defending... for crying out loud, my 91 year old mother could defend better than Danny Fox, why does he still get a game?. We should have gone back to Richardson on the right and Clyne on the left. And Yoshida was found out a couple of times, especially their second. Where is Forren?
Just looking at the stats - QPR passed the ball successfully 166 times, Saints passed the ball successfully 448 times.
