...as the 14th shot of the game crashed into row ZZ, i found myself uttering the immortal words
'this really is a pub league'
Losing to teams with crowds of 2,000
Pitches that resemble a cow field more than they do a football pitch
Goals being scored off arses
Shots more likely to bring down planes than hit the net
The quality of the football at times is shocking, I've always been drawn to lower league / non-league football, but at times this season i've been dumbfounded by the sheer averageness of it all.
Chris Powell was right to highlight the small margins that win games. In the 7 games since he took over, we won 4 in a row and everyone got excited, then lost 3 in a row and everyone got depressed. The standard of play though has been pretty much unchanged throughout those 7 games. We appear to have a team that are probably marginally better in the footballing stakes than others, yet are marginally less defensively organised and 'efficiently effective' than all the others whose first instinct is still survival. When you're going through a spell like this, sometimes you'll nick it, others you won't.
Until we see a couple of successive performances where we have a clear domination of opponents, or alternative a couple of clear defeats (not like the recent 3 marginal ones) and body language suggests something is amiss, i really think we will continue to see a lot more of these in / out results against a backdrop of averageness.
0
Comments
Being a football fan is weird really, in what other form of entertainment would you spend as much money as fans do, get let down by the emntertainment and still come back not just the next time but week in week out year in year out.
I don't think that Brighton will crash ... and Southampton are getting stronger and stronger leading me to believe they will take 2nd ... the two games against them could change that ... and if they do I would back us for 2nd ... but doubtful.
Play-offs must be achieved and with our games in hand should happen ... but look out for Orient making a run similar to the Spanners last season.
It really is small margins.
I'd like to think that once the pitches get a bit better we will see more attractive football but then I always was an optimist
i think it was within the space of two minutes semedo and possibly jenkinson hit shots that were so bad any sunday league player would have received grief for a week for those attempts....abysmal
I stand by this sentiment
I just said the pitch didn't help our Barcelona style.
And that is the problem. It is a crap league but it's the one we are in and on merit I would add.
Absolutely - we don't look any better than the teams we're playing. The only difference is that we have the history and ground to warrant playing in a higher league.
At times I see players (quite frequently) and I wonder if there is any difference in terms of technical ability between them and me, you or anyone else who was an average player at school. I wonder if they just persevered more and now they make their living off the back of their hard work and perseverance rather than any sort of actual talent.
To get in the play offs we'll have to battle and win games by the odd goal which we have been doing most of the season. And we'll lose by the odd goal which we have been doing.
and we're the weirdos who will go whatever poxy league we're in but for the health of our club we have to get out of it .....
and apart from cheer the team on (which makes little if any difference imo) there isn't much we can do
The problem is quality, and we dont have very much of that
Attractive football, a mixture of talented players with a few water-carriers
And a good work ethic
We have several players who could play above this league - it's about playing to their strengths and if that suit Powell and Dyer's preferred method of play then good if not get rid of them and get players in who will work in our chosen system
And in those two comments, there lies the rub.
When we dropped from the Premiership we were going to play our way out of the Championship with some mini-Arsenal approach. It never worked. We drop from the Championship and we're going to play our way out of there. It hasn't worked.
Throughout the last few years, the approach by board, managers, players and fans has been that we are better than what we currently are, but it doesn't seem to be getting us anywhere fast.
But as much as everyone needs to dumb down both their approach and expectations, we surely can't blame anyone for believing we should be better than what we are ?
Its strange. If i go over Welling, or someone off here's Saturday team, or my own Sunday team, i see a 'low quality' but competitive game of football. I enjoy it. Yet if i see Charlton caught up in similar games, i don't get any enjoyment from it. Its not a complete delusion of grandeur, but it just doesn't fit'. The stadium, the recent history, the underachievment attached to it impairs on my enjoyment.
If i go and have a fry up in a greasy spoon, i enjoy it. If i got the exact same meal in a decent restaurant then i'll notice its been slapped on a plate, the sausages are burnt and the beans are watery. it won't be the same, i'd expect more got the same fit to it.
Perhaps this posturing is what's holding us back from progressing. But its bloody difficult to shake off, particularly if its not providing much enjoyment.
The facts are that Dowie and even more so Pardew grievously wounded our club. Parkinson tried to pick up the pieces as best he could with little or no money and was treated appallingly by both "fans" and the Board.
We are now where we are with a legend at the helm and another legend in the background advising him. If as fans we can't get behind that set up then frankly we might as well all give up and stay in and watch the racing on Saturday afternoons or take the wife to Bluewater!
History, bad bit of I agree, but its history
Time to knuckle down and fight to get out of this division
Spot on and this something I have been trying to say for a long time but been shot down in flames, none of our players could walk straight into a Championship team and that includes Semedo & Racon. We are a league one team with league one players.
AFKA, great post.
Very interesting point
They all probably have some areas to their games that are Championship standard, but it's their weaknesses that limit them.
Last summer Parky then had to build a new squad an average wage of £2k a week. No surprise we ended up with the players we did, we could afford them because they have mixed or unproven records at this level. If they had shown consistent quality at this level last season they'd be in the Championship or at least somewhere like Southampton on wages we couldn't afford.
Following the takeover we can hopefully we can afford better proven players and Powell can build a better squad in the summer. Until then we are slightly above average at this level and can at best challenge for the play-offs. Just like last season when we aimed for 2nd place but only just missed out, a couple of results could be the difference this season between 6th and 7th.
but you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear (or something like that)
I went to a number of pre-season games and left less than impressed. However, I watched us play Watford off the park for 80mins and left Vicarage Road with a genuine belief that if we could raise that level of performance week in week out we would be there or there abouts with the automatics.
What I have witnessed this season time and time again is what I now perceive as a very average squad, sprinkled with 3 or so Championship standard players which simply cannot so the basics right. It took the Walsall game for me to actually take on board a reassessment of what we have available players wise.
In terms of individual players that just haven't done it this year, the list is far too long. McCormack, Reid, Racon, Abbott, Francis, Elliott, Martin (when here), Fortune, Doherty (where is the clossus that played at the Valley for Norwich last year? and scored 10+ goals over the season) even Dailly hasn't been immune. Should we accept that all of these players are "Average Joes" and their level of performance this year is the best we can hope for? I genuinely don't know.
Lets face it very little has changed under the new manager. Is that his fault or entirely down to the lack of genuine quality available to him? i suspect a bit of both.
Whatever happens this season (I suspect it will peter out with a whimper and we'll finish 9th or 10th) we are going to see wholesale changes again in the summer. Where does that leave us? Another bedding in period and potentially another long season.
I don't perceive myself as being someone that thinks we are above this division, we are where we are for reason. I've struggled to adjust my expectations and I don't think it is overly ambitious to expect us to be atleast competitive in our home games. Far too many times this season I have walked away thinking "can we play any worse?" - I've usually been given the answer in a subsequent game.
When I see a team like Exeter come to the Valley with a good game plan and team full of players who look comfortable on the ball I despair. We might be in the same division but we are an infinitely different proposition to a club of that stature. If they can do the basics why can't our players?. Surely that isn't too much to ask for?.