Wullie

They were probably just staring at him.

Spurs play pretty much as orthodox a 4-4-2 as you will see, Man United have also returned to it in the last two seasons after a few years of playing with 1 up. 4-4-2 is not "dead" as some people will have you believe but it depends very much on the quality of the wide players, it doesn't work with players who are there to be functional and defensive, nor with full backs who can't get forward on the overlap.

Not once yesterday did Krul roll the ball out to the full backs. Even when Coloccini asks for it, he sends him away and howks it into the air. He's not doing that off his own bat. Take a look at Ben Foster's throw yesterday for whichever goal it was for what Krul should be looking to do every single time he collects it.

I just find that an incredible thing to say.

The lazy tag just goes to show what effect propaganda from the manager can have. I've honestly never watched him once and thought he was lazy. Losing possession cheaply at times and holding onto the ball too long are all valid criticisms (almost always in positions like yesterday where he's given twenty minutes to win the game cos no fucker else will) but the lazy thing, I simply do not get. Robert was lazy, I loved him and didn't care, but I could freely admit that workrate wasn't up there as an attribute. Ben Arfa? I simply don't see it.

Exactly, and with that in mind, is it any wonder that he tries to hold onto it too long in the hope he can repeat the goal against Blackburn - even then he got dropped for the next game. :lol:

Don't know how you can come up with something like a claim that we played well against Chelsea. Sturridge could and should have had an absolute hatful, the amount of times he was in behind Ryan Taylor. FWIW I think we'd have won the game if the referee hadn't bottled the Luiz incident but to say we played well for the rest of the game is a ridiculous assertion imo.

If even that. Barely saw him bar that failed shot yesterday. First goal?

Oxlade Chamberlain on the bench? Oh dear.

Look at the state of this ffs : http://www.nufc.com/2011-12html/goalscorers.html

Right wing, centre forward - the most bizarre thing is that he's never been used as a left winger since his return. Doubt Pardew's ever bothered to take the time to watch that Everton game.

I'm not sure about Spurs where we were decent at times and had to nick a point in the end, I'll go with Stoke, Man U and Villa. The point is that the best you could come up with is 4 games out of 26 played in the league so that’s 1 good game every 6.5 games. The hoofball hasn't been all season as in every game but it has been done far too often and our game is rarely about possession. We've done well in games where we've pressed the opposition and forced them into mistakes, something which other teams have done to us more than we've done to them. they were just the best, I don't think we've got too many points this season that we didn't deserve. I agree we go long more than we should but it's not an overriding tactic. in many of the so-so games, the wigan,fulham at home type games we didn't really go long, we did play it about but it was the lack of movement, the rigidity of the formation that caused the problems. I think it's become an overriding tactic recently though, can't think of many games in the last two or three months where we haven't just tried to hit Ba/Best/Shola from the back.

The point about Ba is surely that it's simply not healthy to have a team that relies on one player entirely to score all the goals. Obviously we're not doing that anymore because Cisse looks lethal too, but the point remains that we have far too few goals coming from other areas of the field. Only one defender has scored for us from open play this season (Taylor vs Everton), I bet that's lower than anyone else in the league. Midfield's not much better either - our highest goal tally from midfield in the league is 2 and that's Jonas, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Keith Andrews at WBA has as many in two games - I could have sworn they were playing with about 15 players yesterday, the amount of support they had from each other in the box.

He's a one trick pony who has lucked himself into a job and for the first half of the season he lucked himself through games which we didn't deserve to get points from. We were getting points because Ba was getting goals from nothing when the service to him was poor yet he still managed to pull balls from behind him to bury when realistically he shouldn’t have had a chance. Our football has for much of the time been turgid dross but we’ve got away with it by going to places like QPR and lucking a draw. He’s lucked his way to getting a point at home against Spurs when he brought on the same stroller as he did yesterday but Stroller managed a goal. Our performances are now getting the kind of results that we deserved earlier in the season and instead of turning nothing performances into points, we’re starting to go the other way and turning fortunate positions into negative results. Our football under Pardew has been poor because that’s the way he likes to play football. We have good players who are watching the ball fly past them as the ball goes from back to front with one big hoof. The players who could control games are being bypassed for much of the game. The amount of money spent isn't a reflection on the type of players we've brought in. We've spent low and still managed to bring in quality because unlike Pardew, Carr is actually good at his job and we've benefited from that in as much as we have good players, even if the manager doesn't know how to get the best out of them. Can you list these good performances that you mention? Sunderland away, Stoke away, Man United away, Man United at home, Chelsea at home. 26 games into the season, you claim five games count as "maintaining good performances" and I'd argue over at least three of those.

Well put it this way, if we finish 7th from where we are now given our fixtures, the fact that we're nearly full strength and the state of the teams around us, I'll be bitterly disappointed.

Fail to see what Villa etc have to do with it. Fact is that finishing below Norwich or that lot is grounds for dismissal so he's doing ok from that point of view. Ok is all it is though. I said in the summer that finishing below 7th should be classed as failure and I stand by that, although I now think that given how good Ba is and how poor Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea are, that should be raised a place or two.

Top seven is the very least we should have expected given that 8th and 9th are Norwich and sunderland. In reality, he's one place above the minimum requirement.

The manager's instructing the goalkeeper and the back four to wang it over his head at every opportunity and the wide players on one side have absolutely no movement, of course he's going to struggle to impact on the game ffs.

Terrifying quotes post match. Clearly can't see where the problems lie. He seems to deal in attack and defence rather than the team as a whole, maybe why the midfield is performing so poorly, stuck in the middle so to speak. Our possession game is as poor as anyone in the division.

Bloody right he was trying to do too much, he was our only chance of winning the game.

Hope you're right but the cowardly way we approach games these days doesn't bode well from that point of view. Pardew will spend all week telling our players how good their players are and how we need to stop them while our own flair players are being told just to get stuck in.

How many shots on target did we have does anyone know? 3?

Think there's still a lot of people who think he's playing good football. He plays just as much long ball guff as Fat Sam's Fat Head did, if not more, and he's quickly getting towards the same amount of negativity as he liked too.

Some people just don't like flair players, plain and simple. It was the same with Robert, constant arguments with people who simply don't understand the game at the top level where ability is by far the most important attribute.

His non-selection is just symptomatic of the manager's negative approach to the game.