For many seasons the overall Club performance has been negatively affected by our dropping too many points unnecessarily, particularly in home fixtures. This season is proving already to be no different, same old, same old. No excuses for yesterday's result, Wolves played pretty well to their abilities, we simply weren't good enough.
It would be wrong to draw too many conclusions from yesterday's game in isolation. This was our first defeat in six PL games, hardly a crisis. The performance level in all of those six games, where even our wins haven't been convincing, maybe raises certain issues however.
- Freed from Conte disease, the inevitable 'new manager bounce', the key signings of Maddison and Van Der Ven, and what in all honesty was a pretty generous early season fixture list, our early season results and league position after twelve games, created an impression amongst many that we are better than we actually are. Any talk of a Premiership challenge has always been pure nonsense, As others have rightly said, City, Liverpool and Arsenal are far more advanced in their development than we are.
- Postco has a lot of good qualities, whereby he has had a significant impact for the better on the culture, motivation and team spirit, and overall football quality at the Club. He is not however the Managerial Messiah that many have built him up to be. He can in fact be quite naive, often outsmarted at this level;
The drop of yesterday's three points was damaging, certainly relative to the 74 point fourth place finish I have been predicting for most of the season. We have a run of four consecutive fixtures coming up against Newcastle, City, Arsenal and Liverpool, plus a rearranged fixture away at an improving Chelsea.
That is a daunting run in which will determine whether we can consolidate as 'best of the rest'. To achieve that I can't help but feel that an old dog is going to have to learn new tricks.
