The title of this thread should obviously have been A Game of Two Halves.
Unfortunately we were bad in both of them. However we still picked up a point when we probably deserved none. Who knows how crucial that point may be come the end of the season? WBA and Sheffield United who lost at Fulham have surely both been consigned to the Championship unless either of them stage the biggest comeback since Lazarus. It is going to be a huge scrap between now and May 23rd to avoid being tagged in that final relegation place. There will in a season of bizarre results surely be still more to come and surprises aplenty. What odds would you have been given a month ago on Liverpool losing their next 4 PL home games on the spin when the season before they nearly had a perfect record at Anfield? I don’t want a shock at Old Trafford this evening. A load more misery for Steve Bruce and the Magpies must be the order of the day. On a positive note I have a full week off before I have to pen my next Match Preview and perhaps in that interlude it will be time to get a few of our walking wounded off the treatment table. I always look on the bright side of life. Well mostly anyway. COYC!
The title of this thread should obviously have been A Game of Two Halves.
Sorted!
If Mike Dean had not bottled it we could have won that game, which would have been unjust, but how that handball was not a penalty is beyond me.
VAR continues to court controversy and it was a major surprise Dean was not ushered back to the on field monitor at the start of the second half when the Baggies skipper Kyle Bartley clearly controlled a header by Conor Townsend with an outstretched arm inside his own box. How on earth Burnley were not awarded a penalty defies any logical explanation.
Have a look at Fulham’s next 6 games- they won’t win any of them.
Yes we could have BT, but did you see that free kick just outside their box, we had three men over the ball, Lowton wide right, I think it was Taylor wide left, we tried to find Lowton 10 yards away on the right, but the ball went behind him and rolled gently out for a WBA throw-in. What makes you think we'd have scored from the pen ? The way we played I doubt we would, there wasn't a player in a Burnley shirt on that pitch yesterday you could trust with a ten yard pass, never mind scoring a penalty.
And this came just a week after a Telegraph journo said it was the best he'd ever seen us play at Palace. We are an enigma, and when we're bad we are really bad, abysmal. Thing is we still get it right often enough to survive at this level, and we will again this year.
I have this theory, the good teams don't play well all the time, average mid table teams don't play average football all the time, and the bottom teams aren't poor all the time. The good teams play well in most games, mid-table teams play well in about half their games, and bottom teams don't play well very often, but they do on occasion.
We play well in enough games to survive, we just forget that after a bad game.