Originally posted by calvoboy
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Some rose-tinted nostalgia going on there - while at times we were great going forward there was some absolute dross too. How many times when Barnes and Thomas were in the same midfield did we get to the edge of the box then not have a clue what to do? Loads of lateral passing with no cutting edge was the story in too many games under Evans. Defensively we were always suspect too, leading us to lose lots of games that we dominated to a late goal against the run of play.
Don't get me wrong, Roy did a great job in stabilising the club, and came close to winning the league the year we finished fourth in a two-horse race with the Mancs, but the myth is growing around his team beacuse of games like the Newcastle 4-3. More often than not we relied on MacManaman's genius to pull us out of trouble rather than a great attacking team display.
Under Houllier, we never came back from a goal down because he never had a plan B if plan A wasn't working. We just started to hit longer and longer passes, and shoot from further and further out.
Rafa has plans B, C, D and E, and can come up with an F on the fly (as in Istanbul). Fulham away in his first season proved that we'd nailed this coming from behind issue.
In my opinion, Rafa's only chink is that he gives the opposition too much respect at times. Against the likes of Birmingham, West Brom, Derby, Sunderland etc. we should just go out and attack as the Mancs, Chelsea and Arsenal do. Rafa seems to stick to the same approach of trying to negate their strengths first instead. This gives the lesser teams confidence against us, as they are not on the back foot from the first minute.
He always comes up with the right approach for the big games though, and I have no doubt he will do the same on Sunday. It still requires the players on the pitch to do their jobs though, and too many of them have been below par over the last few weeks.
Don't get me wrong, Roy did a great job in stabilising the club, and came close to winning the league the year we finished fourth in a two-horse race with the Mancs, but the myth is growing around his team beacuse of games like the Newcastle 4-3. More often than not we relied on MacManaman's genius to pull us out of trouble rather than a great attacking team display.
Under Houllier, we never came back from a goal down because he never had a plan B if plan A wasn't working. We just started to hit longer and longer passes, and shoot from further and further out.
Rafa has plans B, C, D and E, and can come up with an F on the fly (as in Istanbul). Fulham away in his first season proved that we'd nailed this coming from behind issue.
In my opinion, Rafa's only chink is that he gives the opposition too much respect at times. Against the likes of Birmingham, West Brom, Derby, Sunderland etc. we should just go out and attack as the Mancs, Chelsea and Arsenal do. Rafa seems to stick to the same approach of trying to negate their strengths first instead. This gives the lesser teams confidence against us, as they are not on the back foot from the first minute.
He always comes up with the right approach for the big games though, and I have no doubt he will do the same on Sunday. It still requires the players on the pitch to do their jobs though, and too many of them have been below par over the last few weeks.
yeh.
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