Of course that is the feeling mate. Hard for it not to be. The disparity between City and tonight can be boiled down to Frank’s god awful tactics, namely needless shape and personnel changes.
There is no way, regardless of how you feel about our players in the current moment, that I’ll believe our first 15/16 shouldn’t be dealing with Bournemouth, Brighton and (this version of) Wolves pretty summarily. Our failings have been tactical and managerial. Arguably, our best spell this season was when all our signings were pretty new and hadn’t suffered Lampard’s influence for too long. Apart from the odd result since that one run, we’ve got progressively worse.
People pointed - before tonight - to a low goals conceded tally and conflated that with being “hard to beat”. You can’t be hard to beat if you don’t score. FL has tried to play pretty football with players not the least bit suitable for it.
We signed the likes of McNeil and Garner, and yet don’t discernibly play for set pieces or put early balls into the box. We signed Maupay and put him up top by himself. It’s been guesswork pretty much from start to finish, and he made it this far purely on the back of a few good results at the end of last season. Turns out, you can’t rely on blue flares and Spirit of the Blues every week.
