I've just proved that we didn't lose heavily often at all. We were competitive last year. We lost by 3 or more once last year but it has happenned 4 times already in 14 games.
Sure we lost matches, but when did we ship 5 at home to someone like Watford or get hammered in a derby?
2 matches in which individual errors messed us up.
Sure we probably would have lost against Liverpool, but at 2-1 we were getting back in to the match and they were there for the taking. Watford we were 2-1 up until the last 10 mins and we lost our heads.
Both of those games can't be fully blamed on Rafael.
At Brentford we dominated them, we lost to a penalty and had a stonewall penalty rejected for us. If we had more players fit, we would have beaten them.
You could say we potentially lost 7 points in these matches. Which would be pushing us in to European spots, but Rafael can't be fully blamed.
Get Mina back, get DCL back, add a new right back and hopefully more and see where we're at.