Mbemba is 53 yrs old

Actually this has nothing to do with the lads passport. I've just read his interview on Saturdays game and one of my pet hates came up - the old "we are not where we deserve to be". Personally I hate this kind of talk. You are always where you deserve to be regardless of luck etc. We've had a bad trot in the luck stakes but it is not an excuse of reason for our position in the league.

We are there because we are not winning football games.

“Keeping a clean sheet gives everyone confidence that we’re not going to concede goals too easily anymore.

“We need to take this forward now and try to keep more because if we do that then we are going to pick up points.

“We put in a great performance out there and made a lot of chances but just couldn’t put any of them away, and that’s what we need to work on. We definitely deserved to win the game, not draw.

“He (Jack Butland) performed magnificently and kept out every chance we created.

“We tried hard and kept coming at him but he saved everything. We did the best we could against him.

“I would like to thank the fans because as always they were 100% behind us.

“We are close to being a good team and everyone can see that we don’t deserve to be where we are in the division.

“Football involves a lot of hard work and you can see that we are putting that in. The football we are playing is very good, and we are working hard to get out of the relegation zone as quick as possible and up to where a club like this should be.”

- See more at: http://www.themag.co.uk/2015/11/new...se-to-being-a-good-team/#sthash.tsyssVyJ.dpuf

 

For me only one fact that matters. "If we don't score goals we will be relegated". We can keep 27 more clean sheets but won't do us any good unless we start hitting the net. Saying that, we will not find all keepers in Jack Butland form.

 

I think we're playing Great stuff. We will get the wins. The Sunderland match hurt, but I think it lit a fire under coloccinis ass cheeks.

 

We're dropping far too many points in fixtures that we should be getting more from. A dangerous habit.

The only glimmer of hope is that other teams look worse than NUFC. We have the evergreen poorness of Villa, a Sunderland that seem to have even less confidence than us, and both Bournemouth and Norwich starting to look shaky. It's probably going to be a close thing.

 

It's coming together...slowly. The real question for me is ..Is it coming together too too slowly?.

It will be tight ..but think we will be ok. As tasty says we are dropping too many points currently, but there are teams worse than us...The mackems look incredibly poor as do villa atm. Rec3ntly We have been playing much better footy than we have seen for what seems a lifetime (carver/pardew are like dog years one season felt like 7 under them)

With a decent-ish and priority spend at Xmas. (CB for chriisakes, it's not like that hasn't been a huge weakness for 5 odd seasons etc etc)..We should be ok

 

Good question. I think it has taken longer than anyone expected including McClaren. I think he just underestimated how poor our defence was and the personnel within in it. I think he thought Mbemba would be enough and we'd get away with the left back problem, and Colo was still good enough. Sadly Colo has performed way below an acceptable level and the left back scenario with Haidara was killing us. We have had some respite with Dummett, but he still looks dodgy to me defensively and clearly his attacking is not good enough.

I think we have to remember that we had some very good spells under Pardew. We played some nice stuff under him when Cabaye et all were functioning well. People were raving about how that Tiote/Cabaye axis had us playing, how it was such a step up from under Hughton. The worm quickly turned. We looked awful at the start of this season but have slowly come into a decent spell. The worry is its not translating into results.

I think we'll survive and probably finish in the 11th-15th sort of zone. We must invest in the defence though. I think we are fortunate there are some really poor sides. Norwich looked really bad against us, Sunderland did, and Villa look awful. Bournemouth seem to have been found out a bit. However all of those sides with exception of Sunderland have also shown good spells. Bournemouth were excellent in the 2nd half yesterday, Southampton did well to stand firm. Norwich had really good spells against Man C. The point is we can't rely on others being bad enough, we need to go and take points for ourselves. We will if we keep playing like we are.