Couldn't have put it better myself ..... except for the lucas and mascherano axis....
In a nutshell.......yeah....we can use the $$$ example when we lose to chelsea or scrap a lucky draw with man city...
But to lose to fullham who spent less than us....surely u can't use the $$$ excuse ..
Of course Rafa's operating with financial constraints and couldn't buy all the players he wanted... it's a problem.
But at the same time, the games in which we've lost our points have come against teams we were already better than and still are better than. Unless the likes of Gerrard, Torres, Carra, Skrtel, Agger, Mascherano, etc. all wentcompared to the Bobby
The only game we've lost where we could put our hands up and say "yup, they had better players as they've got shitloads more money than us" is against Chelsea.
It's not a big reason for our downfall.
More emphasis should be placed on the fact that there doesn't seem to be a winning mentality around the team. Instead of bouncing back after a set back we're more likely to dig deeper into the losing rut. Instead of pushing on from a big win we're more likely to
That doesn't seem like a quality problem to me (indeed I'll argue against anyway saying we can't win the league with Torres, Gerrard, Mascherano, Carra, Reina, Agger, Johnson, Aurelio, Yossi, Kuyt etc). It's a problem with the way the team approaches games. There's no sense of confidence, no sense of belief and no sense of psychological edge. And that's why we're losing 3-1 against Fulham and Aston Villa when ordinarily we'd be the ones beating them by those scorelines.
The Man U match was a prime example of what the team can achieve if it actually wanted to. Every one of our players had a brilliant game because they were up for it. They fought for every ball, they expressed their quality and they really wanted it more than the Mancs. The only 2 players I've seen push on from that game have been Lucas and Mascherano- they're literally the only 2 players who you can point to in the side and say they built on that confidence. But we saw the team as a whole stick it's head back into the shell the next week when we were outdone by Fulham. And deserved to be outdone by Fulham.
It's easy to get yourself motivated for a Man U match, but it's what happens against the less glamourous teams that counts when you want to win a title. And we've not done it consistently at all (apart from the 10 game run at the end of last season and in Rafa's 2nd season when we finished 3rd).
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