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I think your key choice of verb - 'could have' - is telling. As Marti himself says, football is about doing, not deserving or intending. It's rather amusing to say, as you effectively seem to be saying, if we had different players and hence a different team, we might have made a (more) decent fist of it.
Taking it 'slowly', sure (which is our normal default at the best of times), and you're right we restricted them to a handful of presentable chances, is one thing, but playing like a non-league side looking for a replay in the FA Cup is something else. They're professional players, playing in the same division, against a team that, as I pointed out, has scored 8 goals in 10 games. And we were missing one unfit veteran defender, a rookie winger, and a 35 year old clogger, not a slew of internationals!
Don't get me wrong - I'm glad of the point, which we probably deserved, and it showed we could have a defensive base again to build from, with Saito and Smyth tucking in when needed. It's just that everything else about this team is still faintly terrifying.
It seems I'm harder to please, but I think 25% possession, your keeper timewasting 20 minutes in, and barely crossing the halfway line all game is embarrassing, yes. Against anyone! It was like we played the whole game as if we had 10 men - though I suppose with Mr Celar up top we effectively did!
That's what I think, and have been saying, too. In his last couple of post-match interviews, he comes across to me as seething, tired, and hacked off, while trying to put a brave face on it for the camera! As a manager who's always telling us he wants to play front-foot, possession-based, enteprising football, and has very occasionally even managed it with us, he must be deeply unhappy on an aesthetic level with yesterday's 'spectacle', whatever the effectiveness of his 'low-block' moral victory. It was basically Ainsworth's performance again (though they didn't come as close to scoring this time as then), but without the goal threat and goals, so you could say we've regressed rather than progressed since then on the basis of the weeken's offering.
He also said it was a 'half a pitch game', which, however good they are and however limited we are (and they weren't that good, however much Marti bigged them up - that's 8 goals in 10 games, I think, after their opening little flurry), was both accurate and embarrassing. The Ainsworth win was far more impressive, and impressively spawny, as we had a similarly shameful (lack of) possession but somehow scored two goals. Yesterday, apart from Smyth's unlucky effort, we barely crossed the halfway line!
Personally, I found that completely bewildering and professionally unacceptable from Cifuentes. Assuming Dembele, Fox and Kolli weren't all injured - though who knows these days when a reported blackhead could keep any one of our players out for weeks - if I were the board, I'd be having a word on Monday morning. That was a load of turd!
Precisely. We're doing no more than half of what any professional team should be doing, which is defend and, here's a thought, attack now and again. We look bottom three and no more.
(Actually, less than half, as we also can't play the ball through midfield as a prerequsite of the attack bit.)
Nardi timewasting from around 15m to the derision for the home fans is just embarrassing - standard Champ stuff these days, I suppose, which is why I'm glad I don't pay for this 'product'. Hardly the beautiful game is it, Mr Marti? I'm sure our hard-hitting Offish commentator/interviewe anyone will interrgoate him about it later.
Sure we'be been organised in and around our box, though Burnley have been a lot less incisive than I thought, for all their massive possession. But if it's good enough for us to feel satisfied with that and ignore everything else, it's mainly a sign of how far we've stagnated - or sunk.
Lummocks! I remember it (not that) well, the day before my 12th birthday, sitting in the paddock. Only about 11,000 there, if memory serves. Keeper was in tears, and it could have been more. Did Clive Allen hit the post and Glenn Roeder follow up to score, and Allen not only not celebrate but just look disgusted with himself for missing? Burnley sank at the end of the season, but we were top Div scorers, though still only managed 5th, before Venners got here.
What are his options, though? The man looked haunted and half-resigned, post-Coventry. And his statement today on the Offish that he has 'full belief' in his players reads like a manager and club trying to feel better about itself, even if the usual suspects may ask what I expect him to say. If that were true, however, he wouldn't have (rightly) dropped Madsen, for instance. (And people often say the opposite of what they mean in my psychological experience - especially propagandists like soccer coaches.)
In the words of Basil Fawlty, it's hard to see beyond our team getting anything other than a damn good thrashing in Lancashire. We fluked the spawniest of all victories there under Ainsworth, but lighting can't strike twice - can it?
A gritty 0-0 would probably please us all immensely, but I don't see it happening.
Do any other posters have interesting or amusing associations of Rs players with 1970s children's TV? It might be more fun than watching the team on Saturday.
But even if we paid millions, he's crap and pointless, and the OP has just highlighted he doesn't do any of the things a striker needs to.
Neither he and Madsen should be starters, but I don't suppose those who brought him to the club (Belk, Nourry and Marti, we're looking at you, though if it were a fight at school, we couldn't be sure who started it) will be held accountable. Even though we fans should be doing just that.
Other than Chair as a false 9, though, and he clearly isn't fully fit, I can't see who else can start.
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