Haha, yeah, it's called the "Niall Quinn" effect. As I say, not actually something I necessarily subscribe to.
Have you noticed that after each blip we get on the road to recovery, get up a head of steam and along comes an "International Break" and every thing goes pear shaped as the galactic stragglers come stumbling back home, training is disrupted and some players get dreams above their station about their future, all unsettling and we resort to becoming a shambles again.
With regards to Saints, as an attacking unit, I think Ron is struggling to come up with an alternative to getting the ball wide and swinging in crosses. When he brought in Djuricic, last January, I thought he was looking to address the lack of options we have, not just in the attacking midfield position, but in how we attack in general. I was quite surprised that we didn't do something about that position, in the summer (I don't count Juanmi as he is a striker), and as a result our style of attacking is very one dimensional. As a result some teams can prepare for it, and negate it, unless we get the crosses in from the right areas, ie near the byeline, something Bolassie did several times yesterday, causing a lot of problems for us.
Actually we may not need an alternative to getting wide and swinging in crosses as that normally works. What does happen is that we often rip a full back a new one by going outside him for 15 minutes, but then stop doing it and crossing from deeper or not going outside him or as close to the line as possible.
Against Liverpool we did that for 40 seconds, scored a goal, then got the full back booked, then we left him alone for the rest of the game.
To be fair it's not just up to us, easy to see everything from the Saints POV and want us to do certain things and play certain ways, but those are probably the things our opponents are focusing on not letting us do. In that example I think part of the reason we had such success early on that side and then it dwindled was that Liverpool started in a kind of unbalanced 4-3-3 without a real right-sided player, at the beginning of the game we hit that side hard and Randall was getting completely outnumbered and 2v1'd, then they reacted and Can came and sat on that side as much as possible, which bottled it up a bit. To be honest I didn't catch the 2nd half (Which turned out to be a blessing) so I don't know if space opened up again and we neglected it but that was my take on the 1st half.
Very important message to take from your post Mikey, is that it isn't just about Saints. Every game there is an opponent and fluidity. You are absolutely correct in that assessment. I often think people treat it like it's a game and you move your pieces across a board.
And on top of that, tactics aren't everything. If Caulker had got into the same post code as Sturridge in that half, we'd have gone in 1-0 up and they would have had to take the risks. We were doing ok up to then. This is old ground admittedly.
Well we've already succeeded on moving on from one disappointing defeat, shame it's by going back to an even more crushing one.
Win, lose or draw, I've had confidence in our team, but feel a little lost at the moment. It's like someone has stolen the team I know....need a nice win to get back on track.
