Frustrating results when you look back

Marvanelli

Well-known member
at this season:

Loss v QPR 3-2 - away
Loss v Reading 1-0 - away
Loss v Cardiff 3-2 - home
Draw v Rotherham 0-0 - home
Draw v Huddersfield 0-0 - home

2/15 points from the above teams who all currently occupy positions in the bottom 7.

All games before Carrick came in.

Now we know nothing is certain in football, but I would be amazed if we didn't pick up more than 2 points in these 5 fixtures if we had Carrick in charge, especially those 3 home games against teams in the bottom 5!

What could have been!

The positive slant on it, is how far we've come in such a short space of time.
 
You can drive yourself crackers looking back.
Still haven't got over the fa cup defeat against Orient.
FA Cup quarters v Cardiff in 2008 under Southgate still irks me!

The day before both Chelsea and Man Utd got bombed out, leaving us and Pompey as the best two teams in it. And this was a Pompey who had their star man cup tied!

I thought (and still do to this day) it was our best chance of winning that trophy since the final in 1997
 
at this season:

Loss v QPR 3-2 - away
Loss v Reading 1-0 - away
Loss v Cardiff 3-2 - home
Draw v Rotherham 0-0 - home
Draw v Huddersfield 0-0 - home

2/15 points from the above teams who all currently occupy positions in the bottom 7.

All games before Carrick came in.

Now we know nothing is certain in football, but I would be amazed if we didn't pick up more than 2 points in these 5 fixtures if we had Carrick in charge, especially those 3 home games against teams in the bottom 5!

What could have been!

The positive slant on it, is how far we've come in such a short space of time.
The first two I can take given circumstances at the time.

Ignore where they are now because QPR were red hot at the start of the season (top two going into the end of October) and up until the start of 2023 it looked like a fairly average result. A game we could always possibly lose and probably deserved to due to capitulating in the first half, but where we almost saved ourselves with an improved second half.

And then Reading are home specialists, especially earlier in the season. At Christmas time they'd won 7, drawn 1, lost 3 at home. We were below par, they scored a screamer, it happens away from home.

The three home results are proper shockers.

The Cardiff game in particular was unbelievably bad. They'd picked up 1 point from 4 away games and only scored 4 goals in 8 games. They then scored 3 against us in 45 minutes.

Rotherham were hard to beat and in okay form but still a game a team of our quality should expect to beat. And Huddersfield at home was just a gimme, they've been consistently the worst team all season and we still couldn't find a way to win.

To think we've come so far from those three home results is a credit to the work Carrick has done. And if we do miss out on auto promotion by a few points, due to our poor start, then it'll be no slight on him and I'd back us to get the job done in the play-offs.
 
We were pretty unlucky in our first 6 games to be where we were in the table. We were playing good football. We easily could have been in the top 3 rather than bottom 3. We should have had an additional 10 points.

It was as if panic set in then. Wilder started tinkering with the players but wouldn't change the system. Clearly the morale and confidence dropped. Things just got worse and worse from there over the next 2 months.

But like said above, if we had got off to a winning start, would Carrick ever have happened....
 

I remember it well, despite the loss Boro fans were under the impression Aston Villa had finished below us on goal difference, so we were celebrating at the final whistle, until the tannoy announcer revealed we'd finished 3rd on least goals scored. The Leicester fans (who brought a big following that day) went mental hearing that. Not sure why, I always thought they and Villa had a bit of a rivalry!
 
Yes. Disappointing. But the four games after that were brilliant
Especially celebrating with the players after the Battle of Stamford Bridge ⚔️
I couldn't get to Stamford Bridge but the home game against Bradford was brilliant and I was at the front of the Holgate when Bernie scored the second against Chelsea
 
If we had won those games there wouldn't have been the pressure to sack Wilder and Carrick might have joined later, or not at all.

We can bemoan the Huddersfield draw because we'd already sacked Wilder and were in the process of trying to convince Carrick to take over.

I'd say that and the frustrating Preston defeat for this season.

I'm still annoyed by the Sunderland defeat because of the dodgy nature of it, but they were at least the better team in the first half before the ref messed up.
 
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