There’s nothing negative to come from this result or performance so that makes a welcome change. That’s not to say there’s any reason to feel especially optimistic or confident about the weekend either though. We’ve seen before that these games don’t really give us any indication of where we are form wise when it comes to the league, so beating Napoli changes nothing about where we’re at.
There’s no point looking for positives because it means nothing really, but far better to be downplaying good things than to be stressing about the bad. And there wasn’t really any bad in this. I don’t have much to criticise although if I was being picky I’d say the lack of chances created prior to Darwin coming on wasn’t great. I don’t think that’s what this game was about though. The priority was to stop being so shit defensively, and we did that. For this game at least. Again, I don’t take anything from it moving forward, we need to see it done consistently in the league and we won’t see that for a while anyway as there are only two more games left before the break.
So while I’m not taking too much in the way of positive things from this, it’s nice that there was nothing particularly negative about it either, and although we came up one goal short of winning the group, in truth that would have been a travesty anyway as Napoli have been the best side in the group and nobody would dispute that. To win five in a row following the battering we took in Naples though is a good thing. In Europe we still at least bear a passing resemblance to our former selves.
I was wondering during this game how I’d be viewing the performance if we could completely remove the context around it. This season has been shite, as fans we’re at a low ebb in terms of confidence in the team and belief in what they can do, and that influences everything we see at the moment. By that, I mean that if you could take this performance against Napoli and drop it into the middle of one of the great runs of form we had in the successful seasons we’ve had, what would we think of the performance?
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