I mean this sincerely, that I think the only thing making me optimistic is that we are the best awful team I've ever seen. Sure, we can't win games on the same level as hodgson, but that team never occasionally sparked into life or completely and spectacularly stabbed itself in public. It just plodded along with the enthusiasm of someone walking to their death.
We still produce moments of real magic... That ultimately abort themselves one way or another. We still have players who look quite dominant in moments... And don't look part of any cohesive team. We contrive to find amazing new ways of shitting ourselves, again and again.
We look extremely poorly coached in very basic ways. You see it with our playing out the back, with our clueless buildup, with our largely improvised pressing. Whatever we accidentally do well, we can't hold on to for more than 20 minutes.
We also went into this season weaker than last due to chronic neglect and deferred maintenance of the squad.
Our biggest deficiencies are obvious and solvable.
Why you would entrust any of the architects of this doomed lot to fix it, though, I haven't got a clue.
If you want slot to teach a young group of defenders how to play football whatever way his is, then I'd love to hear why.
Yep. That's why it's absolutely imperative we get rid of the manager. It should have happened months ago. Anyone capable of coaching and instilling the mere basics would have done more with our build up play, our pressing, our movement, our attacking. I'm certain of that. The players are that good and the league is that bad that it wouldn't actually take that much to see a marked improvement if someone came in and just did the bare minimum. Slot is having a detrimental effect on these players.
I said it last night in the match thread... At some point during the second half, the players started to press, get the ball forward urgently, move off the ball. The full backs suddenly decided to overlap the wingers and get to the byline. Absolute basic stuff and it made a huge difference. We could've had 2 or 3 goals.
Then, as you say, we scored and Slot shit his undies and we sat back and went back to playing how we did in the first half.
Fundamentally, he's a coward. He's too scared to start the game with any impetus or aggressive intent. He wants to feel out the opposition and not risk maybe going a goal down - which we invariably do anyway. As soon as we score, he wants us to desperately fall back and cling on to what we've got rather than build on that momentum.
When we go behind and chase the game in the dying minutes, that's when he shows some false semblance of courage by throwing Virgil up front and actually making substitutions, or ludicrously as he did last night, throwing Alisson up front. But it's all a pretence. It's school playground kick and rush stuff because he can't do the basics. He can then point to his desperate, wild gung ho "tactics" and say, "look, we went for it. Look at all the attackers I threw on at the end of the game." But he's actually too scared to trust them in the first place, and he's too scared to win the game before all is already lost.
Get someone in who can do the basics. Just a decent coach. Not a shithouse. Someone who doesn't kill the spirit or confidence of the team. It doesn't have to be some generational tactician. Get the players pressing, moving the ball quickly, moving off the ball. We'd gain significantly more points. Had we done it months ago, we would be in a decent position.
