HudWiganFan
Vital Reserves Team
100% agree, having better players always helps, but it's not what you have it's what you get out of them.
Rotherham and Blackpool have really poor quality squads for this level (probably worse than us) but play to their strengths and get every drop of potential out of what they've got. While West Brom and Watford this season have 2 of the best squads but have not got anything close to their potential out of it. I think too often this season we've not got enough out of what we have.
I believe the squad we have despite it's limitations can be competitive at this level if coached correctly. We've shown there is nothing to be afraid of if we play to our strengths and apply ourselves to the best of our ability.
The league really isn't that special this season, which makes our determination to treat any team who turns up at the DW like they're Liverpool or Arsenal absolutely infuriating. Burnley are the only team I've watched at home who I thought were up to much at all - even the crushing against Middlesbrough was really more down to our own complete collapse than anything they did.
For all the criticism levied at Roberto over the years, seasons like this make me miss his Sin Miedo brand of football. He knew the only way we were to going to survive with the squad we had - and ever-dwindling funds from Dave to improve it - was to throw caution to the wind and pin teams back. He knew we didn't have a strong enough defence to throw 11 players behind the ball and hold out for a point so may as well try and grab a couple of goals for ourselves and see what happens.
We certainly wouldn't have taken off our only dangerman and forfeited possession to Watford for the last 15 minutes like we did yesterday that's for sure. It might've gone spectacularly wrong on occasion but we've been hammered a couple of times at home this season deploying an ultra-cautious approach anyway!
Even Cook understood this better than Leam. Consider the 3-0 vs Villa in 18/19. Instead of making excuses about being 'in our first season at the level', we took the game to a promotion contender from the off and were rewarded with three points that were crucial to survival. We're a million miles from producing performances like that these days at the DW. Sure, having a Reece James helped but our forward options of Garner/Grigg/Jacobs/Windass/Roberts (Powell didn't play) were hardly Galactico-level in quality. If we had an equivalent game coming up, we'd talk them up all week as impossible to beat and how we should just be happy to be in the league, that we've still got a club etc. and probably not register a single shot on target.
Rotherham, Blackpool etc. have squads that really are no better than ours on paper as you say. Though for as long as we stubbornly insist on playing-not-to-lose at home we'll continue to pick up nothing more than the 6 points from 27 we've mustered so far.
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