Yes we play good football usually for very short periods. Might just be me but these good spells are more than offset by the longer periods of poor passing, lack of intensity and stupid mistakes. Haven’t enjoyed this season.
We played good football for half an hour, and could have easily been 2/3-0 up, we might have even played better if we had our two most effective forward players playing (Doak/ LL), or without other injuries etc. Their striker had literally not even touched the ball, but when they got that lucky goal and we realised what chances we had missed it clearly hurt the mentality of the team. I think that might be one of our main problems, it seems to be a mental thing, or some players are not great at carrying out instructions.
We could play bad football or long ball and we would still have bad periods, just there would be more of them with this side (it's not geared up to be direct), and we would be far lower in the table. It's very fine margins.
Poor Passing - Yeah, we will make some errors in a passing system in the champo, we're not Man City, and even Man City seem to struggle with this too.
Lack of intensity - Sure, but maybe the players are knackered, the injuries have killed us. Carrick is not telling them to not get out and close down etc, he's telling them the opposite 50 times a game.
Stupid Mistakes - Not much you can do about these, but we seem to be making more than what the supposed level of our players should. Maybe that's as they don't know the formation inside out, which is expected with a high turnover of players.
We've had quite a lot of bad luck too, and missed a lot of chances we should have really been putting away, that's killed us this year.
Overall I think we're having a pretty good season considering the player turnover, and all the injuries etc.
We're a point from 5th after a very unlucky start, and the highest we've finished in the last 8 years is 4th, and that relied heavily on loan players who are all now or were in the prem (and it was Carrick who bailed us out there).
We're still not good enough to go up mind, and the squad is nowhere near settled enough, but if we do make the pay offs and make it up then at least we would be doing it from a much better financial footing than previous years. This should give us more funds available from prem money to invest, to try and keep us up.
Key issues for me are Right Back and centre mid, we need a no 1 right back and need a solid backup for Hackney and Morris.
This, for me, has been more enjoyable than most other recent seasons, even seasons where we've been higher up the league, but it has been frustrating. Even when we went up with Karanka the football was not really enjoyable, loads complained (not me) about our style even though we were getting results. It's difficult to play well, dominate teams and also get the results, without your players being poached.
The key positive I see is we're going in the right direction with the squad as a whole, and not only that we're net positive on transfer fees. We've got a much better side and squad, and not had to break the bank to do it. But, with their being so many new faces and injuries we're going to have a lot of bad days/ periods in games, it's just reality.
I don't think our transfer model is really helping Carrick short term like, it's reliant on selling your best players to invest in your best players for 2-3 years time, eventually that will drag the quality up, but it will be rocky along the way.