Rick, all I'm asking people to do is look at those stats in the context of Farke's own statements about football and how he intends his team to play. This is a coach who wants his team to "have the ball" and "control" games by having it. What the stats say is that we fall well short on that measure, and do rather better when, either deliberately (e.g. against Man City H, Bournemouth A, Saturday's Cup tie) or having it forced on us by the opposition on the pitch (e.g. Arsenal H, Leicester H), we jettison "principle" and resort to what is basically a counter-attacking game.
Looking into the possession stats in more detail just serves to reinforce what I'm saying. Take the games you refer to, in which "we went behind and then the other teams sat back to pick us off on the break". You are simply acknowledging that, while we set out to exert control through possession, we signally fail to do so. We may have a lot of possession, but we hardly ever have control of the game because of it (Newcastle H being the exception). Put bluntly, it's top six teams who can realistically aim to do what DF wants us to do. We simply aren't good enough, yet we persist in playing as if we are.
Re. the Man City game, which you suggest should be discounted as a one-off. We didn't win it just because we scored with our only three shots on target. We won it because we played a classic counter-attacking game. Our clinical finishing wasn't the only outstanding feature of our play; the way we broke through Man City's high press with quick short passing up the flanks (orchestrated by Stiepermann) was a huge factor in the win and shows that setting up differently doesn't at all mean abandoning all the attractive elements of Farkeball and resorting to Pulisball. Going back to the stats though, even if you remove the Man City game and result, our points haul from games in which we have least possession is double that of games in which we have most.
