I felt we (or Luis anyway) could score against anyone. I was hoping we'd score more goals against anyone too. But I have to admit that I went into those two games against Chelsea and Palace expecting us to lose one of them, as our nervousness and unfamiliarity with the situation we were in (including the manager) meant we needed to go in to the last 3 games with @ a 3 point cushion. I expected City would not drop any more points, and they had the experience of being there before. It's hard to win the league for the first time in decades - bloody hard. Football was fabulous though. Up there with the 87/88 team. But the Paisley teams of the late 70's and 80's would have seen that out, obviously because of their experience, and the '79 team played the best all round football I've ever seen from a club side in England, though I appreciate I'm biased. Point is, any team that wants to win the title has to play at least a few games of parking the bus, and Rogers' teams are totally incapable of doing what Chelsea (with a totally depleted squad, it has to be remembered) did to us. Remember Torres' first game for Chelsea when, under Kenny, we went to Stamthug bridge and parked a ****ing freight train, never mind a bus, in front of the goal and nicked it with a Mirralles winner? Kenny's first instinct is far from defensive, but I don't think he ever got the credit for being able to tactically set up a defence. I hope Klopp, for all the talk of entertaining football, is also capable of parking a bus too. His record of winning two Bunders would suggest so. I ****ing cringed when we tried to blot out United at OT in the first half last month. We just don't have the players. That's what Klopp is up against. Anyway, just one last word of caution and wheels being re-invented. Just seen an item on Sky about some training technique deployed by Dortmund. The player, in the middle of a 'box', is fed the ball into the middle and has to turn and hit 24 targets with a foot selected at the the last moment by the trainer. Where the ball actually goes is recorded by computer and immediately transferred to the coach's tablet, blah, blah, blah. The word is 'box'. We had one at Melwood for years. I would walk up from Finch Lane to Melwood and stand on my bike and watch the players be put through totally exhausting regimes by the coaches (Phil Neal, of all players, seemed superb, as I remember - Brian Hall was another). I'm all for good techniques being continued and, in IT terms, enhanced. But fundamentally we need to start trusted coaches and managers to trust their instincts and judgements in these matters rather than management by numbers, or join-the-dots management, because, and this is the point, the more spurious data is involved then the more bean counters and statisticians who've never played the game at whatever level get their ****ing oar in . We're probably all used to this in the workplace, with the KPI's, benchmarks, and **** knows whatever else bureaucratic nonsense imposed on nurses, teachers, and so forth. FSG seem to have the idea that there's an algorithim, programme, matrix or formula for everything. There isn't. Time to let what the managers and coaches do what they're paid to do and end the illusion that there's a mathematical control over what is, in essence, a human skill, indeed art. Rant over. Good luck Brendan. Hope you get to manage a team and are allowed to use your instincts in future, and that you learn that part of the picture is setting up a defence, occasionally, like Ali's rope-a-dope, is part of the full picture.
