I don’t think we’ll know if this is a good point or not until after the weekend. If we win at Goodison then I’m happy to look back at this and say “yeah that’s a decent result in the circumstances”. If we drop more points at Goodison though, this performance and the way we threw it away at the end is going to be viewed a lot more harshly I think. For now though I’m relaxed about it.
I’m not mad at anyone, it’s just football. We aren’t going to win every game, there are going to be some blips and Newcastle away definitely has the potential to be one of them. I feared this was going to be one of those let down games and I’ve been saying it for weeks now, so I’m not surprised and not especially disappointed either.
You have the massive emotionally draining fixtures against City and Madrid at home, and then you have to go to Newcastle under the lights on a freezing, wet Wednesday night. It had trap game written all over it, and so it proved. They just had more energy than us and we were understandably flat and struggled to raise our game to the required standard. I’m actually quietly relieved we didn’t lose.
The first half was genuinely dreadful and I don’t think anybody came out of it with credit, other than maybe Robbo, who was fine. Kelleher too, he made some decent saves before the wheels came off him in the second half. The first half was just largely awful all round. The defence was shaky, the midfield were lethargic and the forwards were completely ineffective. Slot often makes “duels” a big point of emphasis and we lost virtually all of them in the first half. Physically we didn’t (couldn’t?) compete, and when you factor in how sloppy we were with the ball too, it made for a wretched 45 minutes.
Newcastle haven’t been in great form but that meant nothing to me going in. I didn’t see that having any bearing on the game because teams like this lift themselves when the top sides come to town. It was obvious their crowd would be up for it and that they’d be pressing us and putting us under lots of pressure. We needed to weather the storm and then get on top of them, but we never really got to grips with their intensity. There was a brief spell in the second half when we started to, but then we conceded the second goal.
We looked tired, both mentally and physically. Understandable after the week we’d had. You can’t continue to get yourself up to be at your absolute best every game, because in those big games you rely on adrenaline. It isn’t that the lads get complacent and drop their effort levels, they are trying their best but they don’t have those endorphins flowing for games like this. You know who does though? The opposition. That’s why it’s often so hard, it’s not because the players are slacking off.
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