VIEW FROM THE GALLOWGATE
IN FOOTBALL, managers not only have to select a team for the upcoming match, they also need to look ahead to the following one.
Can they afford to rest a couple? Do they keep a full-strength team if they’re playing a lower team as a confidence booster, because next up is Arsenal, City or Liverpool?
Next up for us is an important quarter-final in our surprise drawing at Man City. Frankly, it wouldn’t really have mattered who we’d selected in the plum 8pm Monday kick-off at Chelsea.
I’ve mentioned this before, but despite the potentially bright future there’s still something of the Newcastle of old.
If you’re struggling for form, your crowd are mutinous and the manager has to wear a disguise to leave the ground.
The post-mortems by the tedious stats wallahs throw out reams of goal ratio expectations, percentage times in opposition areas, heat maps and all manner of mathematics. It’s like being in a sales manager’s meeting from hell.
The thing is though, matches are won and lost by humans not logarithms.
Managers assess the opposition, tell the players what they want and iron out recurring issues, and boy have we got recurring issues away from home.
They partially stem from a lengthy injury list, and partially through making the same mistakes. Some injuries are unlucky, but even with the best medical facilities we aren’t losing players for one match, it’s for months. Sso what’s changed from last season?
You can mitigate it to a degree with smart recruitment, yet without Joelinton, for example, even mundane outfits can ease through our midfield like a trucker through a full English.
This season can’t end soon enough. We’re like those nearcollapsing people you see being carried over the line in the Great North Run.
In the music industry there’s a saying about ‘the difficult third album’ in which you issue a blockbuster and the second sells well on the back of it, so now you have to prove it wasn’t a fluke with the third.
We have the euphoria of an escape from relegation, then a Champions League qualifying. That gives us two months to disprove that theory. Anybody confident?