Warning: Turbo post, don't read if easily bored.
Over the past few days, I've seen Pardew getting the blame for everything. Some of it justified, some of it no more than speculation as means to meet the agenda. I get it, Pardew is public enemy number 1. And rightly so - last week was a sour one for us all, it's going to take some getting over. But beyond last week, we haven't been up to it all season. We've barely won games by more than 1 goal, and some of them have been last minute goals. Without being bothered to do the maths, I think we've probably spent the least minutes in front in games this season. It's been turgid to watch pretty much all of the time, we've gone out of cups at the first round and other than a couple of 1-0 wins in the KO rounds of the Europa, there's been nothing good to say. So why are we so much shitter than last season?
Firstly, let's not kid ourselves. Last season we didn't play well in a lot of games but we found a way to win. There's a lot to be said for momentum - the pre-season plans were disrupted, but the majority of the squad still got away. Those that didn't played for the reserves, which wasn't a disaster. This meant players were, for the most part, fit, with the exception of Ben Arfa who got destroyed in the USA. The new lads were incorporated and everything was rosey. This season, there were no new lads to incorporate bar a few kids, and Anita signed shortly before the Spurs game. Cabaye & Ben Arfa were away at the Euros and got minimal pre-season action, as a result both have had fragmented seasons. Beating the mackems early on last year gave us a big boost and we managed to muddle our way past Fulham & Scunthorpe. Without going through the whole fixture list, great peformances at home to Blackburn and away at Stoke were our only wins by more than 1 goal as we relied on a great defensive resistance, particularly Steven Taylor. The back 4 was pretty much unchanged - something we haven't been able to replicate this season. Once Taylor got his injury we started to ship goals left right and centre leading to a very lean December.
In the games at Wolves, home to Everton, home to Fulham, home to QPR..I could go on, we held on for 3 points after withstanding heavy pressure as we sat back after getting the goal(s). This is not a new thing, and as we found out away to Fulham, the opposition making a big change left Pardew flat footed and we got fucked over, conceding 5 second half goals to average opposition. Once we reached 40 points, we finally started to relax and play a bit, which came in March and lasted a month. In this spell, Cabaye was played pretty much behind Cisse with devestating results, which can be best summed up by the goals against Swansea and Stoke. When Ba was sold this season, Pardew spoke of his will to play Cabaye in the "number 10" role, but we have yet to see it. As a result there is nobody feeding Cisse, and we're relying on lumps into the box. Cabaye is playing in front of the back 4, but from there is he doing anything that Anita cannot do? I doubt it.
There's also no doubt we had players in a real purple patch last season who played well above themselves. Perch & Williamson kept a couple of cleansheets, somehow, whereas this year Williamson has looked every inch a total waste of space. Players like Ryan Taylor came in and played multiple positions to good effect. This season, players have been badly out of form, Tiote, Cisse for the most part, Cabaye to an extent, the usual candidates like Obertan & Shola, Colo's obvious problems. We've also missed a Leon Best type character, scoring a handful of goals and occupying defences - although who knows if his injury would have happened had he stayed. We have had a lot of injuries, especially compared to last season. Whilst we should be able to deal with standard injuries, you can't deny we've had more than the average. This is a failing of the club though - why is the conditioning so poor? Especially when it was pretty good last season. It's definitely something the club needs to look at as we can't go on like this.
Even in Pardew's first season, when he took over from Hughton, we were better at everything then than we are now. Set pieces? Easily one of our biggest threats, Steven Taylor got 3 in 3 ffs. Winning well? We fucked Wolves 4-1, beat Liverpool 3-1, Birmingham 2-0..there was plenty to be optimistic about although there were horror shows like Stoke & Fulham away, but with the loss of Carroll it could be forgiven a little. That is without mentioning the 4-4.
So, so far we've got a poor pre-season, bad "luck" with injuries and out of form players. There's reasons for all of them but the next thing to consider is the Europa league. The first thing is that being away for another game during the week obviously gives you less time to prepare for a game, you can't deny that. But how do other clubs manage? How have we managed previously? Typically, clubs competing in the Europa league will come close to getting back into it - or better - the next season. Liverpool, Spurs and latterly Chelsea are pretty close. We're nowhere near. So whilst our squad isn't as strong as those teams, you'd have to question why that is. The lack of investment in the summer really left us under prepared, but many of the first teamers didn't play in the EL group games, so I don't buy tiredness as an excuse. Hopefully without the Europa League Pardew can do some proper preparation, and we'll see some well executed game plans, such as Stoke & WBA last season.
The quality of football has been heavily criticised too - it wasn't brilliant for most of last season until the spell I touched upon earlier, but it was effective. We scored a lot of "ridiculous" goals, something we've rarely seen this season. Ryan Taylor against Everton and Jonas down at Wolves being decent examples before even going to Cisse territory. We have generally tried to play from the back at home since January, the only problem is it gets to the final third and a hopeless cross is fired in. This is where we'd benefit from Cabaye being 20 yards further forward. I'm not sure Pardew knows how to get the best out of what he's got - the problem is we don't know if Sissoko can play deeper, but he certainly isn't a number 10 and his ball carrying skills could be pretty useful still from a bit deeper. I'm fairly sure Coloccini will leave and I wouldn't be surprised to see Jonas follow him as we move to an even more French line up.
The more you consider it, the more you have to say last season was the fluke rather than this season being a one-off. You can't fluke your way to 5th place though, there were some very well thought out game plans and the shape of the team in "that" run of games was great. I hope Pardew has plans to replicate it but it's going to rely on players being fit and on form. Looking back on these 2 and a half seasons under Pardew there are some things that he has only done this season, but also some worrying traits. It seems to me that his main aim is to get us "safe" and then expand a bit, but until then we'll see more of what we've seen this season. Nervous football where we sit back on 1 goal advantages. It's no surprise we've come back from behind so much at home recently, as we have to attack more and show some flair, which otherwise we wouldn't see I bet.
I'm not in the Pardew out crew just yet, for some reason the players seem to quite like him and the structure of the club is based around him. I think we need some more staff, as we seem light on those numbers compared to a lot of clubs, and the conditioning needs a serious overhaul. But the recruitment structure we have is decent, we've got good calibre players and the optimist in me hopes that we can get a settled team over the summer and build a team that can finish where it deserves, which is about 8 places higher than where we are now. If you look at how we played in the first half yesterday - that's more like it, we need to do it for a whole game though. What I do fear is that we'll get off to a bad start and he'll be canned in October, and we're thrown into another transition season. I hope Pardew turns it round - I have no hope of us being brilliant in these remaining 4 games, but we must stay up by any means necessary and get back to "normal" next season. I just hope normal is last season rather than this.
