Just think, we’ve got three more months of this. I’m not sure I’ll cope. It’s hard watching these games at the moment. The stakes are massive but it’s not just that. The way we’re playing is making it really difficult to stay cool. We’re approaching the most important part of the season and our form seems to have vanished completely.
So much for that warm weather training eh? Half the squad got ill or injured and the rest of them look like they’re running in treacle. Whatever happened to “the Red Arrows”? You know, the forward line that terrorised the whole of Europe last season?
That was the thought I had watching this as a memory randomly popped up in my head. It was one of our European games last season. Might have been the City game but I think it was before that. Could have been Moscow. Anyway, who it was is irrelevant. The thing that popped into my head was an image of four or five of our lads charging forward against back peddling defenders who were shitting in their shorts, and Steve McManaman making that “Red Arrows” comment.
Remember those days when we were just scaring the shit out of everyone with our speed and devastatingly incisive attacking play? What the fuck happened? Now it’s just ponderous, predictable, toothless. Opposing coaches have obviously had time to come up with ways to slow us down and frustrate us, but it seems like more than just that.
That might seem like a knee jerk reaction to a couple of draws, and yeah there’s an element of that because I’m not gonna lie, I’m pretty fucking despondent today. Clearly we've been doing something right as we’ve got more points than we’ve ever had at this stage of a season and we’ve only been beaten once. What I’m saying is that something isn’t right and in truth it hasn’t been for large parts of the season.
Mané even said something last week about how the attack hasn’t really played at it’s best this season. They had a slow start but then looked like they were finding form, but recently it’s all gone to shit again. And now the defence isn't able to compensate for it.
This season we’ve had loads of those wins where we’ve just got the job done and found a way, and that’s great, I love it. If you want to win titles you need plenty of those wins along the way and it’s those results that have us where we are. What concerns me is the lack of hammerings we’ve dished out.
I remember writing last season that scoring three goals had now become level par. I expected three goals a game. If we got more than that, we were under par. Any less than three and it was an over par round and a bad day. That was the bar that we set. This year we seemed to undergo a change in identity. It was suddenly all about the clean sheets.
In the opening months of the season the general consensus seemed to be “this is great, we’re winning without playing at our best. Imagine how good we’ll be when the front three hit form”. Yeah, well it’s February now and we’re still waiting. The clean sheets are becoming scarce and since the turn of the year we’ve dropped seven points in five games.
I definitely don’t go into games now expecting us to score three. I miss that feeling but I don’t want to seem too ungrateful as, after all, we’re still top of the table with a three point lead. We should be over the moon about that but I don’t feel it. I should, but instead I’m just becoming consumed by the fear of us being overhauled.
After seeing Spurs and City both win at the weekend, I had a feeling of impending doom. I was more nervous about this game than I had been at any point all season. It had nothing to do with the opposition either - West Ham had been battered by Wimbledon and Wolves in their previous two - I was just nervous about us. As it turns out, I was right to be. We were fucking garbage. You could even argue that it was a decent point in the end because we should have lost.
I don’t want to hear about injuries either. Spurs have injuries but they continue to win. Hell, they’ve been without Kane and Alli, while Son missed games too. Imagine us without our front three! We look bad enough in attack even with them. Until last week they’d also been having to deal with the strain of playing in both cups too. No mid-season getaway to Dubai for them.
So no, I don’t care that Henderson and Wijnaldum were missing. I don’t care than Trent, Gomez and Lovren were out either. Cry me a fucking river. West Ham had more players out than we did (including their star man) and they didn’t have the luxury of bringing in players like Milner, Matip, Fabinho, Keita and Lallana to replace them. So get the fuck out of here putting this down to injuries. Had we lost to a top six side then it’s a valid excuse, but this was a team that had their pants pulled down by fucking Wimbledon a week ago.
That team we sent out to play West Ham should have been much better than they were. The team that didn’t beat Leicester last week likewise. But we’re not playing well. Some will say it’s the pressure of trying to win the league but it’s more that we’re just not playing well, both collectively and individually. We look predictable and easy to defend against. It’s not so much about nerves, it’s more tactics and form.
The biggest difference between now and a few months ago is that we aren’t keeping clean sheets. We scored first against Leicester and also against West Ham. Early in the season that meant three points. Now, there are no guarantees because we’re conceding goals and giving up chances. West Ham should have scored more than one. So should Leicester.
We were fortunate to lead in this one as our goal was so far offside it’s hard to believe how a professional official can fail to spot that. All I can think is maybe he was hypnotised by Lallana’s magic feet. That was brilliant from him, but then control in tight spaces has never been an issue for him. He’ll still be able to do that when he’s 60. It’s the rest of the game that’s now looking like it’s beyond him.
Maybe if he had a run of games we’d see him return to what he was, but what are the chances of him getting a run of games? Slim and none. He’s not good enough to be first choice anymore and he’s not durable enough to stay fit for more than three games at a time even if he was.
Anyway, he did superbly to work that ball to Milner, who then did well to cut it back to Mané to finish expertly. We’ve been on the wrong end of some bad decisions of late so we were owed this bit of luck with the offside. Just a shame we didn’t make it count.
I give credit to West Ham for the equaliser. It was well worked from their point of view and although it was questionable whether Noble should have been allowed to get away with impeding Keita, I don’t have any real complaints about that. Maybe Naby should have took a dive when Noble stepped across him?
Antonio does my head in. Shite against everyone else and then turns into fucking Didier Drogba when he faces us. He probably won’t score again all season, the twat.
I haven’t seen anybody else mention this, but I don’t like what I saw from Alisson on the goal. I’m not saying he should save it, but just standing there and watching it go in isn’t a good look. Put it this way, Mignolet would have been fucking slaughtered for that. It’s not the most powerful shot in the world and if the keeper’s angles are right he should at least have a chance at reaching it. Standing rooted to the spot isn’t what I want to see from my £65m keeper, but maybe that’s just me.
After that equaliser, we looked spent. Lifeless in attack and vulnerable in defence. West Ham missed glorious chances when Rice and Noble both missed the target, while all we had were a few hopeful curlers from Salah that went straight to Fabianksi. There seemed to be no confidence or belief within the team and there was a real lack of urgency in their play. Passing it around on the halfway line in stoppage time summed up the entire night I thought.
We probably need to change the approach to defending free-kicks now too. It’s worked great all season as 90% of the time we’ve caught about four players offside. The problem is that some opposing coaches actually do their homework and Pellegrini exposed our set up repeatedly. We always set up for the first time ball in but West Ham didn’t play it like that, they had a player take a touch to throw the timing off and they kept getting in behind us.
Klopp said the poor set-piece defending was down to making three changes. Nope. It was down to a coach identifying what we have been doing and figuring out a way to counter it. What will happen now is other teams will copy that approach. I’m not saying we’ll be wide open for an Antonio type goal all the time, but the days of us catching loads of players offside by just holding that high line are probably over. Find another way, Jurgen.
And while you’re at it, sort the attacking tactics out too as this is shit and too easy to defend. The build up is too slow and I don’t know how many times I’m going to write this but I’m sick to fucking death of seeing us trying to go through the middle over and over and over. It’s like trying to jam a marshmallow in a slot machine. Utterly futile.
The opponents know we’re going to try and play little one twos and they just pack the centre and snuff it out. The space is out wide but we rarely use it. The only width we have is provided by the full backs and when they do manage to get in behind and whip crosses in we always look dangerous. How about giving them a fucking hand, eh?
Watch some videos of Man City and study how they do it. 80% of the goals those cunts score come from low balls across the six yard box and they actually managed to score the exact same fucking goal THREE times against Arsenal at the weekend. Granted, Arsenal’s defending is a joke, but the point stands.
It’s been going on for most of the season too. For months we were talking about how “it wasn’t clicking” up front but it was great that we were still winning because of our badass impregnable defence. I think we let in six in our opening sixteen games or something. Then the arse fell out of the defence and suddenly we’re dropping points all over the fucking shop because the unstoppable attack of last season hasn’t shown up for most of this year and we don’t have any realistic alternatives to freshen things up.
I said after Leicester that I’d rather see Origi come off the bench than Sturridge but ideally I’d rather see neither of them. When Bobby is as horrific as this though we have little choice. He had to come off and he was lucky to last as long as he did. Absolutely fucking brutal he was. I lost count of the number of times he passed it straight to a West Ham player. Inexplicably shit.
Origi isn’t good enough and brings back memories of our last two title challenges, when our attacking cover was David Ngog in 2009 and Iago Aspas in 2014. Origi and Sturridge are distinctly better than those two (and both have made contributions) but there’s still too big a drop off between the starters and the back ups. Big Shaq has been quiet of late too, which is worrying as he’s the ‘wild card’ and the only game changer we can call on outside of the first eleven.
The less said about Keita the better. The only thing he seems to do well is take the ball effortless past a couple of players in midfield, but there’s little point to that when he either runs into a third and loses it, or passes it to nobody. The fact he was probably our second best attacking player on the night tells you all you need to know about how bad the rest of them were.
If Divock had put that chance away in the dying seconds I’d have been over the moon (particularly because of the fume it would have caused given he was a yard offside), but it wouldn’t have allayed the fears I’ve got over how we’re playing. Forget the results for a second, it just doesn’t look right at the moment. It’s a lot like it was earlier in the season except we were keeping clean sheets then and that covers for a multitude of sins. Now we’re leaking shite goals every week and other than the Palace game we’ve been unable to overcome that because it’s not clicking in attack.
Last season Salah was a 10/10. Firmino was probably a 9.5/10 and Mané was an 8/10. This year you can knock two points off Mo and Bobby’s score. Sadio is the same or slightly better, but overall the front three haven’t hit the heights they did last season. Part of it is on them, part of it is probably tactical. The switch to 4-2-3-1 hasn’t worked but we don’t look right when we revert to the 4-3-3 either.
I don’t have the solutions. I’m not sure Jurgen does either. He looked rattled during this game and his post match interviews did little to inspire confidence. Singling out the officials after that game? We were given an outrageously offside goal and if Origi had taken his chance we’d have also benefitted from a clearly offside last second winner too.
Kevin Friend wasn’t even bad. He didn’t get every decision right but on a list of reasons we didn’t win the game he wouldn’t even be on it. Even mentioning him at all smacked of clutching at straws. West Ham had far more reason to be pissed off with the officiating than we did.
The linesman who missed the offside for our goal was as woeful as his haircut. He probably shouldn’t be allowed to run the line in a Premier League game when he displays such bad decision making. I mean if he thinks that haircut is acceptable then how can we trust his judgement on anything?
There seems to be two camps developing in the fan base now. There are those who are all doom and gloom and terrified that we’re going to blow it (and those who think we already have) and there are those who are getting all pissed off at the negativity from the other camp and are at great pains to point out that we’re top and everyone needs to stop being such bad shithouses.
I really wish I was in the second camp. I imagine it’s a much happier place to be than where I am right now. I’m not fully in the first camp but I’ve got one foot in there. I can’t help it. I want to be brave and to believe and to trust the players and if I was in any way encouraged by what I was seeing I would be, irrespective of how many points we’ve dropped of late. I need to see us playing well. We need a convincing win to get things kick started again.
We’re still three points clear and we’d all have taken that when the season started. A three point lead having only lost one league game all season is hardly cause for panic but it isn’t telling the whole story either, as form has to be a consideration. Had we drawn our first two games and won both of these last two to go top we’d be buzzing because momentum counts for a lot and right now we’ve got none.
Being three points clear in February would have seemed like dreamland back in August, but how would you have felt if prior to the trip to the Etihad (when we were seven clear with a chance to extend to ten) you were told the lead would be down to three in a few weeks time?
We won’t even be three points clear for much longer as I’ve never been more sure of any result than I am about City winning at Goodison this week. Even if Everton shock everybody and actually give it a go it won’t matter because they’re a terrible team. Nailed on three points for City, which will put them ahead on goal difference having played a game more.
In seven days we’ve gone from having a chance to go seven points clear to probably finding ourselves in second place (albeit with a game in hand and our destiny still in our own hands). It’s torture isn’t it? I want to enjoy being in a title race but it’s just not fun because there’s too much riding on it for us. We want it too badly.
There will be twists and turns all over the place between now and May and we’ve still got a great chance of winning it, but only if we snap out of this fucking slump we’ve been in since we battered Arsenal. It needs to happen quickly because if not we could find ourselves out of it in the blink of an eye.
On paper Bournemouth should be a routine home win, but the way we’re playing? Anything could happen. They’ve got a style of play and forwards that can hurt us if we show the kind of sloppiness that’s been on display recently, and the crowd are probably going to be a fucking bag of nerves if we’re not two goals up in the first ten minutes.
After that we go to Old Trafford, which as I’ve been saying for weeks is something I’m dreading with every fibre of my being, especially now that we’re looking vulnerable and United will smell the blood in the water.
These are really testing times and we have to find a way to get through it as unscathed as possible and then hope we run into some form again and get some players back for the run in.
Star man is Mané again. He wasn’t brilliant, but he’s one of the few who is playing anywhere near his best level at the moment.
Team: Alisson; Milner, Matip, Van Dijk, Robertson; Fabinho, Keita, Lallana (Shaqiri); Mané, Firmino (Origi), Salah:
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