Welcome Ange: To Dare is to Didgeridoo

[SteveAWOL]

Why did you go for game week 9 ?

Crystal Palace was the last time we had our first choice defence play the entire 90 minutes plus a strong bench, think that the entire squad was available apart from Son and Spence who was out of favour back then anyway.

 

[Raziel]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1880229291050381615

This is a concern

We are all wondering if he's dead man walking, the concern is when the players start believing it.

 

[thfcsteff]

That's simply because we now have 3 revenue streams as opposed to 2 (like we use to and like most other clubs).

So if we don't make Europe...not a big thing, we have the safety net to take a longer view.

It's not a lesson lol....it's a benefit of the long term plan.

Logically? Yes. But mate...Daniel has never been able to resist meddling. That would be the big shift here IMO.

 

[Bishop]

I'm a bit tired of the injuries excuse. Romero has been a liability this season and given away 3-4 goals. VdV is a very good player but he is error prone. The big thing he gives us is pace both from a defensive and offensive perspective. Udogie has been mediocre for a year. None of their replacements have cost us (m)any more goals than those lads really.

Vicario is a good keeper but we haven't really missed him from a goals against perspective. Forster cost us two goals really I can recall - they were both in a game we won. Vicario might have stopped Woolwich's winner the other night admittedly but Kinsky looks a good find to me.

You could argue stability could give us cohesion - I'm not so sure. I haven't seen any sign of it so far in Ange's reign.

I hope I'm wrong, I really do but I don't expect a massive uptick in results when those boys come back. I think we'll pick up 3-6 points from the next two games and hopefully average 1.5 points a game or thereabouts for the remainder of the season. A cup is Ange's best chance of survival and that really depends on us being "on our day" at precisely the right times.

The primary reason we are where we are isn't bad luck IMO.

The crazy thing is the same people who are lamenting Romero's injury absence are typically the same people who were squarely putting the blame for our early season goal concessions on him. So when he was playing it was his fault and now he's not playing he's one of the catalysts for our poor form. You almost couldn't make it up.

The same was the case for Udogie, he was getting plenty of (valid criticism) now he's a missing starter.

I always said this season our defensive frailties aren't individualised, they are system caused. It doesn't matter who we play as we've now seen, we concede silly goals consistently.

 

[Bedfordspurs]

Crystal Palace was the last time we had our first choice defence play the entire 90 minutes plus a strong bench, think that the entire squad was available apart from Son and Spence who was out of favour back then anyway.

I’d say Villa we were only missing VDV so a similarl missing number to palace
It’s say the better comparison is first 10 vs last 10 games myself
But fair play for doing the leg work

 

[Baleforce]

Logically? Yes. But mate...Daniel has never been able to resist meddling. That would be the big shift here IMO.

Is it meddling when you own the place?

He’s responsible for everything, literally everything. He’s top of the chain of command.

 

[SteveAWOL]

I’d say Villa we were only missing VDV so a similarl missing number to palace
It’s say the better comparison is first 10 vs last 10 games myself
But fair play for doing the leg work

It’s difficult to find a decent sample size to make a comparison between how our first team fares compared to our backups, as just like the previous year van de Ven’s hamstrings packed up at the start of November and then our treatment room once again needed a revolving door.

We started last season so well it seemed obvious that once the injuries cleared up we’d be challenging for the title again but after 10 games of this season, with a largely fit squad at his disposal, we were still only 7th having lost 4 of those matches.

Looking at weeks 11 though to 21 of last season, when we didn’t have Europa League + Carabao Cup games to stretch our squad, compared to this I noticed that we scored and conceded almost an identical number of PL goals; although we thankfully only sank down to 12th place in the form table.

Hopefully next season our squad will have enough strength in depth to cope better with November and December.