Friday 15 August 2008

A testing week

I'm pleased to have been abroad during what seems to have been a difficult week. The previous week was bad enough: dominated by rumours of Corluka's move to Spurs. Over last weekend the defeat of Milan was lost behind stories that Steven Ireland could also be sold for financial, rather than footballing reasons. Since then denials from Hughes have slowed, rather than stopped, the speculation. The chairman's attempts to unfreeze that £800m, so important to his plans, have ended in failure. If he is convicted in absentia (would he have left if he wasn't going to be?), Garry Cook will have to find some way round the issue to fend off the Premier League.

Until Thursday evening, I'd got through all of this by clinging solely to football. I thought we had been slowly improving from the EB/Streymur games through to the Milan game. A few wins in August and I thought I could stop worrying about the off the pitch stuff. But our first competitive game under Hughes at CoMS, and this happens. In front of 17,200 people.

Sunday can't come soon enough.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

sunday aint gonna be any better, with sturridge shooting his load all over the place like a 14 year old boy, bojinov (still) slightly injured and caciedo scoring as often as cliff richard, i whole-heartedly believe we'll be lucky to get a point. villa looked organized the other night, we looked sub-standard. again. i still don't know if santa cruz is the answer to our prayers, i think a more organized and disciplined midfield is key. assuming hughes plays a 442, we need to start with petrov, johnson, hamann and elano. speaking of johnson, either stay and play the fucking game you're mean't to,or go and be done with it. i was embarassed at how our midfield looked the other night. what the hell happened? elano playing through balls to no one, johnson playing one-twos with the danish defence, ben haim making runs forward then doing nothing, and why oh why did we keep playing that ineffective long ball shite. i mean, come on, sturridge and bojinov are not the biggest of lads and those danes were huge... the only spark in midfield for me was petrov, he kept going for 90 minutes, final ball not great but he did carve out some good chances. allthough he kept roaming around the pitch throughout the second half. cant say i blame him, with the total creative impotence of the rest of the team. on sunday, i think hughes should play a 4 5 1 and hope we get something out of the game. for gods sake, play a left back at left back, stick two holding men in midfield (gelson and didi) and have elano playing behind bojinov. im sceptical about sunday, we need early points, and i worry about the future of the club if we start to underachieve in the first 5 games.