Here's an idea... Start with Rickie Lambert, since he is by far and away our best chance of getting a goal, and then we might score in the first half and make the other team do the chasing for once. Sorry, but giving yourselves half an hour to win a game instead of 90 minutes is ****ing ******ed. Rickie doesn't need to be an impact sub, he is far far FAR too important for that. Leave that to Mayuka, J-Rod etc. I do admire your attempts to justify Nigel though. Fair play. But open your eyes, he is out of his depth.
We didn't give ourselves 30 minutes to win a game, we gave ourselves 90 minutes to win the game, instead of going all out to win a game in 60 minutes and then losing it in the last 30. And just throwing Rickie Lambert into that game with that set-up would have changed little. As I have said, we played a conservative, solid style in an attempt to control the ball and kill West Ham's attacking threat. Many people have complained about our defence, and it was set-up even worse than it has been all season with Yoshida at LB, so what do you do if you have a bad defence in an even worse injury situation? Do you throw your best attacking men forward for 90 minutes and leave yourself open? Or do you look to keep control of the ball, take the sting out of the other team and protect your troubled defence? I know which one I'd choose. To make that happen, we played with 5 midfielders, 2 deep, and 3 in slightly more interchangeable positions further up the pitch, and a striker to chase and harrass West Ham into even more long balls than they would play anyway. That wasn't to say we had NO attacking intent, in fact we were more dangerous than them before half-time, and even after half-time, that style earned a goal with JRod setting up Lallana, but it was the completely wrong situation for Lambert, West Ham are set-up to deal with him, but he's a clever player and a quality one so he wouldn't allow himself to be dominated, but at the same time he would not make much impact. The way West Ham played left no room for Lambert's style of play, they were just sat with 10 men behind the ball for long periods, it needed someone who was going to move around and pull defenders with him, and run into channels, and JRod did that and it also almost got him a very nice goal. Lambert would probably have had little or no effect on that period of the game, when he can have an effect, and when we needed him was in the second half, with him fresh and raring to go, and whilst JRod and Mayuka are good players, they have both had little success this season other than Mayuka against Villa, so if we needed someone to make an impact it was Lambert. Too often this season we have done well for the first periods of the game, gotten our lead and then lost it largely because our players have gotten tired and we've subbed off our best players who started the game for less-than-stellar replacements, we couldn't see out the end of City, United or Fulham, and we couldn't even see out 20 minutes in the Everton game because of how we were set-up. Nigel has learned from that, like we all want him to, and so instead of going balls-to-wall from the off and then running out of steam, he chose to bide his time keep us in control of the game, and then utilise our attacking talents once we had placed ourselves in a position to allow them to win us the game. It's a cliche, but it's a marathon not a sprint, how often in long distance running or cycling or whatever, do you see someone sprint out full pace in to the front, and then manage to stay there and win? Not often, you see people keep themselves around the front, keep themselves in control and in with a chance of winning, and then when the moment is right they give all they've got and push for the finish. Why don't they sprint at the beginning, because they don't need to and it's counter-intuitive to what they want to achieve and they need to save their energy for when they need it. And we didn't start Lambert, not because we couldn't sprint from the off, not because he couldn't put us into the lead, but because it was counter-intuitive to what we were looking to achieve, and by sprinting from the off it would allow our opponents to eventually overtake us and leave us for dust.
We played in a manner that almost worked perfectly, if it wasn't for a few uncontrollable errors in concentration, I have a great degree of certainty that we would have gotten at least a point. We had 61% possession in the game and we had 81% pass accuracy to their 67%, and we even won the battle in the air which is supposed to be their strong point by 53% to 47%. What does this show you, we controlled the game, stopped them froming being able to string 2 or 3 passes together, and even nullified their aerial threat. And when I saw those stats a couple hours after the game, when I was myself still unsure how we had lost and what had gone wrong, I asked myself the classic question, "How on earth did we lose that game?" And the answer to the question of how you lose a game of 61% possession, completely outpassed the other team and won the aerial battle. And that answer is simple, bad luck, and a couple of bad moments that ruined a game that we were otherwise set-up to win.
Leaving Lambert out and going for a 4-6-0 counter attacking anti football is a disgrace and totally out of sync with this football club , the worst formation I can ever remember .
Leaving out your goalscorer to try to prevent goals is ****ing stupid .
If you think we played 4-6-0 then you either don't understand how formations work, or you're just purposefully massively exaggerating in attempt to prove your point. And the idea that we played counter-attacking is just plain wrong so I don't know how you've come to that conclusion, and people often use this sarcastically as a stupid attempt to undermine someones point of view, but I'm genuinely asking, did you actually watch the game?
Oh Jesus , oh Lord please help 
Of course whenever you have a leaky defence, especially one as banged up as ours, you want to take the pressure off of them and you can either do that by playing conservative and carefully, keeping the ball away from your opponents and limiting their oppurtunities to attack, or you can risk it for the biscuit and attack to try and outscore your opponent regardless of how open it leads you at the other end... But do you really think we would have outscored them 5-4 if we had tried this? Of course it would have been a different game, but for every change we made to try and attack the game, we would have exposed ourselves defensively, and in our situation playing a risk like that just doesn't seem prudent. We're not that desperate yet, are we?