I expected 6th at the start of the season, so 4th would make me a happy yid tbh
Especially if it's at Arse and Liverpool's expense, since they're the ones that probably need CL money the most.
***
I don't think this was a turning point at all, though we'll have to wait and see of course. Despite being a neurotic at the best of times, I actually have a very different feeling from last season this time around. Last season it felt like we had "it" - a kind of glow, the whole team on one golden wavelength - for most of the first two-thirds of the season and that meant we could destroy teams from time to time as it all clicked . . . but the problem was that once we fumbled "it", we just couldn't get it back. We fell out of sync and nobody knew how to get back on sync. A good part of that I think is because the fundamental fount of "it" was intuition and emotion and confidence, and you can't just graft or think your way into that. You can't just say, "come on guys, we have to believe in ourselves!" and then everyone in the team: 1) knows how to believe in himself ==> 2) actually does believe in himself.
(Aand this is not, btw, to shortchange Harry into a simple-minded man-manager - just noting that his style was to select a palette of ingredients and let the dish speak for itself, rather than actively craft a recipe and chop and season and
cook).
What's different for me this time around is that we're actually not floating on emotion. We haven't clicked for the entire season; instead we have gotten results by working our arses off in attempt after attempt to execute a certain system. Usually these attempts have been pretty damn clumsy, as you'd expect ... individual players oftentimes couldn't quite figure out and execute their 'situations' (refer to that Mind Games article) optimally, which is par for the course when the new things you're learning haven't been engrained in you yet so you have to *think* during the game.... hence, slow, disjointed, confused performances. We're not playing by our inner ear anymore; now we try to exert conscious control over our actions in a game. The negative I think is that this will look terrible at times, like watching a newborn foal trying desperately to get to its feet, but the payoff - if we can get this engrained in us - could be HUGE.
The critical thing is that each time, we are getting a little better. Each time, individual players have a set of tangible 'things I want to do this game', and they can measure their progress according to those tangible criteria as well as the powerful swell of victory or defeat. We don't need to grapple for an elusive emotion; what we need is to learn, practice, and execute a tangible system that in the end is made up of fairly basic components parts. We can actually work towards this on the training ground and on the pitch. We won't execute it perfectly, we will be hit by setbacks - but we can make small improvements that accumulate over time, because: 1) we know what we want to do (we have real, tangible objectives) and 2) we actually have a usable guide to follow under our coaches.
I don't mean to shortchange the importance of mentality and confidence, it's just that mentality is one of those iffy unquantifiable things that everyone knows is good and important but
you can't actually construct an actionable plan to get it. You can see a sports psychologist for weeks and weeks, but it might mean nothing if you end up choking, as we have all too often (I should know - played piano competitively for years, only to fudge it up in the finals every time! :lol
. But what you *can* do if you're choking and panicking in your head and the blood is roaring in your ears is 'fall back to basics'. Fall back to what you remember doing in training. Fall back to the simple pass, fall back to adjusting your position. You don't need any sort of mental flow for this, in fact the conscious thinking and concentration that triggers choking may even be better here.
That's why I believe this was a blip, not a trend. It is normal for any team trying to grasp new coaching to suffer clumsy setbacks from time to time. However, if you are working hard on the tangible things, eventually the progress is going to start to show in bits and pieces. If you are relying on talent and confidence rather than working towards a tangible gameplan, then there's little you can do in training after a terrible defeat beyond a pat on the back and gallant speeches. But ultimately, I think those words are emptier than the ones you take in with your feet.
