Koemans tactics and attitude to setting up the team hadnt changed massively from last season. The difference was Lukaku being gone.
Not having a player in your team who can be relied on to regularly score goals is a massive issue and can easily cause morale to drop. Our squad with the exception of Lukaku is not weaker than the previous year.
If you look at just the Brighton and Burnley games, a goal scorer would have likely yielded another 4 points. That alone would have had us at least 11th, which is not a sackable position.
Disagree mate. I agree Lukaku is part of the problem but not
THE problem. We were pretty bad in that 10 game spell last Autumn when Lukaku was playing in every game. And our away form has been ropey throughout 2017, mainly due to the negative tactics employed by Koeman. Lukaku played in more than half of those games. Plus our home form post Xmas last season was probably as much down to the form of Barkley as it was Lukaku. You could also include Coleman in that as our season fell away after he got injured. Davies and Schneids were also in top form and Baines was also a lot more influential.
There's no guarantee that somebody like Giroud would have made a difference, and even so the additional 4 points would only have papered over cracks. The performances against Arsenal, Burnley, Spurs, Chelsea, and even Bournemouth, were worse than anything I saw last season bar Chelsea away. It's not just the league form either. The football played in the 9 EL games so far has been awful, apart from 45 mins against Split (when he played with wingers I believe). Some of those ties were against teams Waterloo Dock would give a decent game.
No for me, blaming everything on not bringing in a top striker is taking the easy option. There has been so much more wrong with our football this season.
