I'm just getting increasingly frustrated with the same issues recurring.
Our most successful system this season has been 3 5 2 pressing high and moving the ball, it's how we beat Brentford and got our best win of the season against Rotherham. We then completely abandoned the system the games after this and reverted to 5 stodge 1 where there is no adventure and we just revert to playing it long. Because of this system we have to play our worst striker as our better ones aren't suited to playing this way.
We spend January bringing in a striker to warm the bench and another Kelly which further compounds our lack of invention in midfield when we were crying out for creativity. That is emblematic of the manager's philosophy this season where the first goal is to avoid losing the game, not attempting to win it, which I think has cost us more points than it has gained us. He seems to have a simple philosophy of away point = good result without context. An away point at a promotion chasing team is good but for us to show no intent against a multitude of teams who are either poor or out of form looks increasingly like poor decision making.
The games we play tend to follow a pattern of missing a sitter early on, conceding a poor goal then falling in on ourselves and either making more mistakes or not attacking the game as we're worried at conceding more. It looks like neither the team or the management have the belief that we can come back and win points at the moment.
We also have the issue of constantly picking players that aren't doing their jobs and costing us points. Persisting with a goalkeeper who is clearly not up to the level, allowing a CB to play every week while he makes error after error and playing a striker that has struggled for goals his entire career and letting him miss chance after chance. It must be incredibly demotivating to those sat on the bench wondering what they have to do to get a game.
Then we have the summer recruitment which was aimed at playing the same system we did so well in league 1, which is fine in principal if you don't then abandon the system after 5 games. There should have been players win an eye at a plan b and we would have been better combining the funds spend on so many foreign dud signings on 1 decent player.
Yesterdays game was so frustrating. We were playing the worst team in the league, one that we've beaten multiple times using a pretty simple method, play our back line high to negate the long ball, play it on the ground between the lines and press them at the back. Yesterday we decided to do none of that and wen't long, played their game and made them comfortable.
I'm not calling for him to go yet but I'm starting to seriously wonder if he is capable at this level. As the weeks go by and the same mistakes occur he's looking more and more like a manager that has done an incredible job to get us to the Championship but doesn't have the ability to progress us any further. Unless things change then I can't se the club moving forwards, even if we stay up I think we're likely to be in another relegation battle making the same mistakes. Is he capable of doing a Barnsley or evolving us so we're at least a mid table Championship club? I'm not sure.
