Can we just go back in time eight days and have a redo of everything? What heady days they were. Top of the league with eight games left and looking forward to a European Final in Dublin. Then it all fucking collapsed around us. It’s not over and it would be overstating it to say we need a miracle, but we’ve really put ourselves in a shitty spot now.
This is what happens when you keep conceding first though. Eventually it catches up with you. Our chickens finally came home to roost. Everyone has been saying it all season. You can’t keep giving teams a goal start and expect to win every time. Even teams like Palace, who hardly ever win games. They’re dangerous if you allow them to be, and boy did we allow them to be. They played really well in the first half and we were lucky it was only a one goal deficit.
We were considerably better in the second half and could/should easily have won the game given the chances we had. The performance was laboured and we were far from free flowing, but we did enough to win the game and if two of those chances go in then this game feels an awful lot like Brighton, Sheffield United, Fulham or any of those other close ones we’ve won at home.
Those chances didn’t go in though and the reaction has been somewhat visceral. Finger pointing at specific players (mostly the forwards and Dom), talk of how they’re not good enough and that the new guy needs to replace his forward line. I mean, I get it, but it’s really not that simple. Our five forwards have scored 82 goals this season. The midfield has transformed us from the jaded, slow mess we were for most of last season into a team that got to mid-march still chasing a quadruple. As a team we’ve got, I’m not sure exactly, I think 130 goals or so. Up until 8 days ago things were going swimmingly but three games have completely torpedoed everything and we’re all lashing out wildly, particularly at the forwards, with some justification even though I think our front five have more than the forwards of Arsenal and City.
Despite the goals though we all know this is not a clinical, ruthless team. The opposite in fact. We score loads because we create loads, and the forwards are responsible for creating a lot of the chances they waste. Replace them with clinical, hardly ever miss forwards (if there even is such a thing, as even the likes of Haaland and Son miss shitloads of chances too) and you might not be creating anywhere near as much. So it’s a conundrum in that sense.
The wastefulness against United cost us badly and we had to be much better in front of goal that day than we were. Against Palace I thought for the most part it was clearly just a case of it being one of those days where we were just never going to score, probably because everyone was just a little too tense and not relaxed. The only miss I had a real problem with was the Jones one. That’s just awful. The other ones were just the kind of frustrating thing that happens on days when it’s not going for you.
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