The Start of the Slide

We’re into November and the Lane is already less a fortress, more a bouncy castle: inviting, soft and easy to penetrate. It’s now very obvious that those early season horror shows against West Brom and Norwich weren’t just bad days at the office. They were the new norm. Even our only two home wins could easily have gone the same way. Apart from West Brom, the only other one of last season’s top-half sides who we’ve played at home is Chelsea, and they handed our arses to us. That’s relegation home form.

It’s not like we’ve been peppering our visitors’ goals either. They say you should worry if you’re not creating chances. We’ll we’re not creating chances. And when you’re not creating chances, that’s a clear indicator that your team’s not functioning. Your players aren’t getting into the right positions, your strikers (striker) aren’t getting the right service and your set pieces are poor. We haven’t even had one of those days that everyone has, when the ball just will not go into the net. If that’s one of the most frustrating things in football, then it’s just as frustrating when you can’t create anything. If you’re missing opportunities, eventually one will go in. It won’t go in if you’re not.

It’s not like we were mugged by Wigan either, despite their winner being another awful set piece goal (the forth in a row) and the extensive time-wasting that followed. The fact is, they were better than us. When they went for it, they played more coherent, snappier football and they created better chances. That’s right people – we’re now at the stage when we’re getting outplayed by Wigan on our own ground. We got exactly what we deserved, and so did they.

Funny how quickly you go from ‘forth in the league with half a team out and not even playing well’ to ‘fifth in the league with half a team out and not playing well with a horrible month coming up.’ We’re going to Man City, Arsenal and Lazio and have Liverpool and West Ham coming up at home. By Christmas, Wigan could be above us. On the evidence we’ve seen so far, we should already stop analysing our league position in relation to the top four. The top four is a pipedream. Arsenal are in as much of a mess as they ever are and they’ll still be in there at the end, while we’re unlikely even to have to worry about playing on Thursdays and Sundays next season.

Our midfield is slow and non-descript. But then again, what do you expect when you lose your two most creative players and fail to replace them adequately? You certainly ain’t going to get better. Hudd’s looking more cumbersome than ever and Gylfi still fails to bring anything other than a keen work rate to proceedings, lacking the necessary awareness or confidence to keep an attack moving without completing a full circle on the ball – and probably passing backwards. Our defence is uncertain and currently incapable of seeing out a match without conceding from a set piece. As for our attack…we’ll we’re currently choosing not to have one. This might come as a bit of a shock, but we’re not Spain and we’re not Barcelona. Andre needs to forget about the theory, about shapes and structures, and do what our players are comfotable with, do what’s practical. That is, when you’re losing a game by playing a particular way, do something to change the way you’re playing and with it, the game. An easy litmus test as to whether you’re making the right substitution is to put yourself in the opposition’s boots. How will they react to the change? When you take off Jermain Defoe, your most dangerous finisher, a livewire capable of exploding from a period of inactivity with a goal from nothing, are Wigan’s central defenders likely to be disappointed? Or are they likely to wonder, like everybody else in the ground, what the hell you’re doing? Would they rather face two of the Premier League’s most dangerous strikers, who present very significant and very different threats, or would they rather face only one – who will be easy to mark and easy to outnumber? You don’t chase a game by running sideways.

But as a team, we’re not even going sideways. We’re regressing like an iceberg on a bed of lava. The fixtures so far have been relatively kind, perhaps masking the faults that were all too evident on Saturday. In fact, we haven’t even capitalised on that relatively kind string of games, we haven’t built up a lead over the teams behind us so that we’d still be in a good position even if, as seems inevitable, we drop a few points over the trickier period ahead. But there’ll be no hiding place as our nasty November takes shape. The fun starts here.