Reply With QuoteLike Calgary ⭐Originally Posted by Calgarybaggy
That's the number of points we have given up from winning positions this season. We have scored first in 11 games and only won three of those games. The remaining eight we have drawn four (two from two goal leads) and lost four. If we had held on to win only half of those games, we would have about an extra ten points for 30 points and be in fifteenth place. Had we won all those games we would have an extra 20 points, be on 40 points, safe and in eighth place. We have only come from behind once to get a point and that was against Arsenal of all teams.
By this time last season we had scored first in fourteen games and won eight, drew five and lost one. Pulis built this team to grind out one goal wins. We did that fairly successfully for a couple of seasons. However, he didn't build a team capable of coming from behind to win games, which was one of the big complaints about him. He did not seem to have much of a Plan B if we went behind. We did come back to win games occasionally but it was not because we changed our style. We just kept grinding away the way we always played and sometimes got lucky. But if you win most of the games you lead in, you clearly don't have to rely on coming from behind if survival is the goal. And I think that was why Pulis didn't have a Plan B. It wasn't necessary to change your style if you win most of the time when you score the first goal.
So the real difference between this season and last season is that last season at this point in time we won over half of the games we scored first in and, more importantly, we only lost one. This season for some reason, we lost the ability to win them under Pulis and he paid the price. We got in Pardew and he had two choices: completely change the way the team plays so we don't have to rely on winning those one goal games, or teach the team to win those one goal games again. He has not been able to do either.
I think we will all agree that we don't really have the personnel to completely change the way this team plays in a few weeks or months and so if we couldn't win one goal games with Pulis in charge - the one goal win specialist, what chance did we have with anyone else in charge? The acid test would have been if by some miracle we had managed to hire Pep Guardiola when we fired Pulis, would he really have been any more succesful than Pardew with this team? The way this team was built, if it can't hold a one goal lead, it is in serious trouble.
