by bigmick » Mon Feb 12, 2007 9:04 pm
It's a good question and a good topic. When you look at what Man U have done this season (which is probably winning the league from a starting position at the end of last season almost identical to ourselves) you have to say we have underperformed in comparison.
They gave Van Nistelroy the elbow and brought in Michael Carrick, and while the return of the excellent Scholes has been significant the feeling persists that our first eleven is very close to being the equal of theirs. The difference is probably in that they actually play their best eleven or nearly all of it much more often than we do ours, and that their really big players have performed consistently at somewhere near the top of their game. Ronaldo by all accounts has had a wonderful season and while being fitful, Rooneys abundance of natural talent will always have a massive influence when he is playing in a very average Premiership. Vidic appears to have come on a bundle and even Evra seems to be doing a job, while Saha has surpassed what most of us thought he was capable of. Overall though, we all know they are by no means a great team just simply the best of a pretty ordinary bunch and My hunch is we could and should be a lot closer to them.
So what went wrong for us? Obviously giving everybody a seven or eight point start in the first three weeks of the season was suicide, and without wanting to revisit the whole debate I hope we have finally learnt our lesson as far as that is concerned.
One or two of our signings haven't really worked out, and none of them have absolutely uprooted trees. Gonzales certainly and Pennant probably are in the first category, while even possibly Kuyt and certainly Bellamy have improving to do if they are to convince they belong in a Championship winning squad.
Our biggest players, Gerrard and Alonso haven't really had great seasons either. It may be due to fatigue, personal problems or whatever but neither will look back on this season with fondness, with the feeling that they did themselves justice.
And what of our manager? Well I think he is a brilliant football man and I'm glad we have him. He will know himself however that he has not had his best year either. Too many mistakes in selection and over-rotation have hindered our progress, while it appears that his performance in the transfer market this close season was slightly below par based on his excellence in the past. Like everybody else he needs to up his game for next season.
What to do? Well firstly and formostly we need more than two really big players. I know we have lots of good players BTW but I am talking about fellas who opposition fans would accept as being probably the best or almost the best in their position. You could I guess make a case for Carragher ut beyond that I think we would be dreaming a bit. This will either happen because one of our existing players makes the step up (and FWIW Kuyt looks the mostlikely option to me) or by buying big.
Secondly we need to stop handicapping ourselves by not picking anywhere near our strongest team on too many occasions.
Thirdly we need to take a cold hard look at our existing squad and cull out any deadwood. There are many debateable options but for my money the jury has surely returned a verdict on Bolo Zenden (it now seems incredible that we chose to play him in central midfield when we played Arsenal away) and it is high time that players such as him were shown the door.
Long post but that's my opinion. Feck the cups, we should be seven or eight points higher in the league than we are in my view.
"se e in una bottigla ed e bianco, e latte".
here (i know that's what it sounds like) but compare the report card of the Liverpool first 12/13 and it doesn't make anywhere near as good reading.
