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I'm interested in what the picture will look like at the end of the season.
There's been a lot of concerning stuff (the 9 losses in 12, the sideways passing in front of a packed defence, the apparent lack of creative movement in the forward line) but there's also stuff that looks like it's getting somewhere (full-backs deployment, ability to hold the ball centrally in build-up) and we know Slot has a bit of a cob-on for Enrique's 24/25 PSG side.
We had the slump, we've stopped the rot. It's admittedly not enthralling football right now, so the question will be "is this it?" or is this a stage of development of the side where we ensure more solidity like a Benitez side (in possession in Slot's case, excellent control of space in Rafa's case) for a couple of months before sliding the risk up a touch once we have that solid foundation sorted.
I like that we're getting the control back somewhat after some of the really troubling performances (PSV was.....something!) but we feel like we're stuck in 3rd gear at present with question marks as to whether Slot is going to show us a version of the side where we get up to 5th gear and blow a couple of sides away.
I'd love a larger sample size of having Kerkez and Frimpong in the set-up simultaneously for one thing to see if that gets the extra 5% out of us and would love to see how much (or how little?) impact another pace merchant could have in the side.
The still-very-recent slump of form, the inability to find a title defence and the drop-off in entertainment value are inevitably going to impact how we see it - so right now there's going to be a lot of *long exhale* about the place - it's just whether or not we're only a couple of steps away or not as it felt to me (made a thread on it) that we had a lengthy list of small problems stacked up, rather than 2/3 major ones.
I think in a different context we could have chalked today up as "just one of those days" like the 0-0 matches we seemed to have against Birmingham under Rafa, but knowing that our faint hopes of rekindling a long-odds title push (now 12 points behind when we might have hoped we'd be 7 points behind Arsenal if we'd won a few games on the spin including beating the Gunners) has probably popped the Balloon a bit more than normal.
The distraction of a European game would be bliss right now!!!!!
unhappy drunks are not a pleasant thing sorry to say
Cleaning up the Scots since the 13th century
Hahahaha…