O’NEILL NEEDS PATIENCE, BUT HE WILL RELISH THE SUMMER
THERE will be a lot of frustration bubbling under at Stoke City at the moment. Five games to go and you’re well aware when you go out on the pitch that the result means nothing, no matter how professional you are as a player.
If you look on Saturday as a case in point, Birmingham were playing for survival, Stoke were playing for 10th or 11th.
It’s not a secret, the league table is there that shows you everything. You can try to work yourself into a lather, but good luck doing that match after match, fighting tooth and nail for 90-odd minutes.
Because it was long before last week when it became clear that it was almost impossible to do anything this season.
Of course mathematically, a big run of wins in the Championship can propel you up into the top six… but the players aren’t daft and they know what is achievable and what’s not.
Playing behind closed doors doesn’t help. Of course it’s the same for both teams but there’s not even an angry or passionate away end to give you that extra boost or keep you on your toes when there’s nothing riding on a fixture.
As a manager you need patience. Most will have been in that situation themselves at some point as a player. Everyone can say the right things but it’s easier said than done, everyone is desperate for the summer to roll on for a chance to start afresh.
We know what we need to know about the team this season and for the next big questions we won’t find out until next season.
It’s frustrating for fans who can’t even see their team at the moment and a lot probably aren’t in a great rush to see them anyway given recent form!
It’s a difficult little period but rather this than worrying about relegation. You can try every little trick in the book to try to make sure you go into summer with everyone looking forward to getting going again.
· I FOUND another reason to add to my extensive list for disliking VAR.
It can be soul destroying. Heungmin Son has been one of my favourite players in the Premier League and now every time I turn on the television at the moment I see the replays of him rolling around on the ground.
I’ve always thought he played the game simply and honestly, running around getting forward and back, popping up in the box to score goals, not always easy goals. If he was running through the middle clear on goal you’d need a bulldozer to stop him.
I didn’t think he had that kind of gamesmanship in him that led to Manchester United’s goal being chalked off against Tottenham.
It feels like it’s been taken away from me. There was nothing wrong with him. The way he went down it looked like he was going to be out for 10 weeks, but he was only floored for as long as it took to disallow a goal.
What kind of message does that send out to anyone watching?
I’ve been saying since the start of this season that VAR can’t be the answer. If it was the answer it would have been brought in 10 or 20 years ago. It was considered too daft then and it’s too daft now.
It’s not in every ground in the country – and when the FA Cup comes along it’s used for some fixtures and not others. It’s not just making top flight football different from kids football, it’s different from the Championship, League One and League Two.
There is an old saying that a good referee is one you don’t notice, but now we’re noticing them all the time, whether it’s as extra officials behind the goals or coming to the sideline to watch a replay while their face is on the big screen. It is the main talking point game after game.
People will grow to really dislike the stop-start nature of it all, the delays. As time has gone on, it’s becoming more and more annoying. It’s like American football.
It might not be quite so awful if at least they were at least coming to the right decisions at the end of it but it’s all so long-winded to come to debatable decisions. What’s the point of that?
As a player or manager I might have left a stadium disputing something that’s happened and maybe later I’d find out that the referee had been right and I was wrong. If he had got it wrong you’d just have to accept it, but that was that.
This nonsense is all so futile. It was intended to help perfect the game but instead it’s solved nothing and taken away the spontaneous joy of scoring a goal.
The verdict is in from me: VAR can go in the bin.