We just need to learn that we start the season August and not in dec/jan like the last few years,Do people think that the pre season were we go etc does have an inpact on how we start the season as surely were we finish cant be blamed on some were we went 9months earlier and so on,Anyway hope for an easy Home game to start the season if you can ever get an easy game that is.
I don't believe any of that, no. In fact I was banging my head against the wall when I heard Moyes saying he's replicating the 04/05 season by going to America, and changing the training routines around.
That's hardly any more than superstition. At the end of the day, we were fit enough at the start of the season, we were just tactically outfoxed. People sussed our play pretty quickly -- without pace, incision or a major goal threat it's easy to defend against us if you do so in numbers. From the very first game, Blackburn nicked a lucky goal, and then just defended. Other teams did this, and we never seemed to solve the problem. Our best spell came when Cahill was injured/out, because we had to change our formation; the 4-4-2 with Saha and Beckford was great as it stretched defences; two upfield presences, one of whom has bags of pace. The 4-2-3-1 with Ossie, Gueye and Bily was good too, as it made it hard for opposition teams to mark us, and we countered well with it; Ossie in particular was highly influential.
But since then Moyes has gone back to 4-5-1 and he's also used a 4-2-3-1 but with Anichebe alone up front; someone who offers no goal threat at all. It's really amateurish, and the CM partnership of Neville and Heitinga rubs salt into the wounds -- I mean seriously, why show this kind of negativity against teams as poor defensively as West Brom!? Our embarrassing defeat to them at the weekend heralded only their 2nd clean sheet of the season!! Woeful.
I know I've gone off on a rant, but the point I'm trying to hammer home is that no amount of tiny pre-season changes, or fixtures against no-mark, crap teams, will solve these problems. We need to be looking at new personnel and new tactics, and that is it.