Looking for the Performance
It’s fair to say that before the Villa game, we hadn’t put together two consecutively good halves of football on our own ground. We’d had the odd half here and there and some good signs away from home, but not much to hint at last season’s demolitions of Newcastle and Liverpool, wins over Arsenal and Everton and draw with Chelsea.
The Villa game may not have matched up to some of those games performance-wise, but it represented the closest thing yet to what our home form has been – and needs to be – if we’re to get anywhere near the league placings of the last few years. We had a fast start without reward and a strong final half-hour that should have brought more goals, especially after Villa went a man down. We needed to be more ruthless in punishing our downcast and disadvantaged opponents rather than aimlessly playing out time in the corners, missing out on an opportunity to boost our confidence and goal difference in the process. Those spells sandwiched a period where we seemed to run out of ideas, as well as an uncomfortable first five minutes of the second half where we were lucky not to go behind. Hugo Lloris, bienvenue. Again, it needed a bit of luck for us to get going, when Caulker scored the only kind of goal that’s easier than a tap-in – the one that literally hits you and goes in. But then again, you know what they say about lucky managers.
Just as important as luck is results. They’ve started coming, and they need to have performances with them too. While an under-pressure manager in a notoriously difficult new job – looking to rebuild his reputation while following in the footsteps of a successful predecessor – needs a few results to embed his position and get the players onside, he also needs the performances to show the fans he’s taking the team in the right direction, that he has a plan that he can communicate, implement and bring to life. That plan looks like it might take the slightly different form of a Dempsey or a Sigi supporting a lone Ade or Jermain – i.e. exactly what we did for most of last season. It’s a shame we needed a couple of bad results to show it was probably the way to go, but then again I’m reassured if Andre’s learning as he goes along.
Talking of performances and luck, we’re likely to need both when Chelsea come to the Lane on Saturday. If the Villa performance was a notch up from those that preceded it, this one will need to be at least a notch up from that.