I am a little surprised at how negative people were about our defeat against Brighton. The actual reality of it was we defended woefully for their goal because we've got a winger at left back, a winger at right back and a right back at centre back who was nowhere near his man.
If we just do that one bit better it would have been a 0-0 draw, they didn't create tonnes.
Attacking wise, we weren't necessarily on it but it was also against a team playing 3 centre backs, a centre back in midfield and two wing backs. They set themselves up so defensively and honestly, I'd be surprised if that does them well.
We miss Phillips far too much and I'll keep saying it until the club finally address it but we cannot continually gamble our form on Phillips being available. We need to sign someone who can slot into that position when he is not there. Struijk is a centre back and I think will be a good centre back but he is not a midfielder, his passing isn't good enough, he isn't mobile enough and he panics when in possession and doesn't position himself when we have the ball.
Honestly, I wasn't that disappointed with the game, to me I always just look at that line up and basically its a championship line up with Raphinha. We defended one moment badly and didn't get any luck going forward.
My only concern is we are half way into the season and I'm not seeing much from Rodrigo. It says a lot when Tyler Roberts comes on and looked livelier and more threatening than Rodrigo. I'm not one of these 'bin him off' people considering he has only been in the country 5 months but I did hope we'd see a bit more from him. Might be a case of him being out of position but again, we don't sign anyone to play that Pablo role.
Also worrying a little about Klich shooting at moment, he seems to be balloning every shot he gets these days 4-5 foot over the bar. His accuracy has deserted him.
To me it just sums up where I think we are, we've got a championship squad particularly defensively without Llorente and Koch fit thats aim is to comfortably remain in the division around 14th. Then next season really develop the squad to compete. We will be safe, though I do think we need to pick up these wins to get us to 35 points sooner rather than later as our end of season fixtures aren't the easiest in the world.