I think so.
When was the last time we defeated a genuine title contender? (dead rubbers not included).
I think our approach vs the better teams is wrong. For me the best tactics when playing against a better team is: 1) Try to stifle them ie stop them from playing their game. 2) Identify their weaknesses and try to take advantage of them.
It looks to me we mainly focus on our game and just go toe to toe with everyone. That approach is fine against inferior teams, but against better teams you get the following:
- A very open and end to end encounter
- Opponents generally commit fewer mistakes than you because overall they've got the players.
- Opponents are more ruthless when it comes to taking advantage of your mistakes because, again, they've got the better players.
Therefore 9 out of 10 times the opponent ends up conceding less goals and scoring more goals than you. A good example of this was our recent encounter with City. We were very naive to just go out there and play our own game against them.
How many times did we see Fergie employ the likes of Phil Neville in midfield against us? Or Ji sung Park? He recognised the fact that we were the better footballing side, therefore he never tried to take us at our own game. Instead he looked to disrupt our passing game and counter (we were very vulnerable on the break). Ancelotti did the same. We never do something like that in the big games.
Sometimes I doubt whether we scout opponents in-order to identify weaknesses we could take advantage of prior to meeting them. Take our game vs Napoli for example; every man and his dog knows Armero is weak left back, a disaster waiting to happen. In fact he's so bad Benitez had to call Reveillere (who was decent at best in his prime) out of semi retirement to take his spot, why didn't we look to take advantage of this terrible defender by playing Walcott against him? Our goals at the Emirates were both created from the right, but because we were playing so deep in Napoli we couldn't capitalise on his woeful defending, we badly needed pace on the right. Believe it or not Walcott never played a single minute against Napoli - shocking decision.
I'd like to hear your views.
