by earleyroyal »
26 Oct 2008 00:14
Archie's penalty earleyroyal People who resort to insults in place of debate are the tiresome ones. How about you point out what is wrong with criticising a bad performance?
Oh and if you were sitting next to me at the match (where it matters) you wouldn't hear a word of criticism out of my mouth.
The answer is 16
I just think there is an element of fickleness about the whole debate. That's why I think your ironic response to TLM was a bit over the top. We do have some problems and I would agree with you that centre midfield is our main concern. I would have Harper in instead of Bryn who played badly today. I do think that QPR played for a point, shut up shop and got what they wanted. I will be disappointed if we lose on Tuesday though. That is the test. If we win this performance will just be a memory. Sorry for the abuse.
You're right in that there are some people who think that every win means we're going to break the record, and that every defeat means Coppell Out, however I can't see much of that on this thread. That would be fickle, this thread seems to me just to be people reporting what they saw. It was a really, really poor performance, bereft of ideas and confidence, and people have every right to vent their frustration. Better to do it on the board than at the game
over the past couple of years, the strongest critics seem to have been those who go to a lot of the games and are just disappointed at poor performances and results, not fickle fans or glory-hunters.
I said at the start of the season that I thought we'd be around the play-offs but just miss out, however having seen the weak standard of the first 4/5 teams to visit plus a couple of away games it did appear that we had one of the best two or three teams in the league so I revised that opinion. At home it seemed like we would roll over most teams. However a lot of those wins were built on goals where the opposition were dominating, or at least in the game, and we killed them at a set-piece (Palace, Burnley, Doncaster). While it was great it did cover up our weaknesses, mainly the glaring one in central midfield. I love Gunnarsson, he's a model professional, but he seems to have reached the point where his intelligence and hard work can't get him through games because he's too slow. Karacan is still learning and it's unrealistic to expect him to form a key part of a Championship winning side now. The way I see it, our other main weakness (linked to having a weak central midfield) is the tendency to hoof it when we don't have the players to do that, as someone said earlier on the thread.