RocktheCasbah never said it was all negative. I enjoyed the game today, but that's precisely because we were awarded those two penalties and won 4-0. Even happier that City dropped points as well. The whole point I'm making isn't that we played shit, it's that if we are expecting to be challenging for the title then we need seriously improvement in our overall game management. This means creating high percentage clear cut chances and then not getting panicky when we do take the lead and letting the opposition back into the game.
Luckily the Bournemouth players made our lives easier today by making challenges in the box that were as clear cut penalties as you would ever see allowing us to effectively kill the game off early. Most teams won't give you two stupid challenges inside their own box like these guys did so I'd not put too much praise on our overall performance when judging it by what we should be doing to improve upon our results when compared to last season.
If there were no hopes of winning the league and the expectations is just to qualify for the CL performances like these are fine. Our standards, or what we'd expect our standards to be considering our finish last season and our expenditure this season, is expected to be higher than that. The game in isolation is a very positive result, but in the grand scheme of things you'd expect us to perform better in the majority of our games is we have any hope of reeling in City.
For the record, some of these posts seem to be making it seem like I'm being negative about our result and I'm unhappy, which couldn't be further from the truth. I'm really happy with how the weekend has gone so far. Just hoping to see more from us as the performances so far this season generally haven't been what I'd hoped they would be in our quest to improve upon last season.
