A family trip kept me out of the loop all weekend, and have to say I am glad that it did.
I warned before the game that we were up against one of, if not the best team I`ve ever seen in the Premier League, their resources are so vast, the depth of the squad so deep, the quality that they have so incredible that they hardly miss a beat when they have three or four of their best players side-lined.
The gap between us is a chasm, both in financial terms and now in points. They have got the league in the bag, it is just a question of whether they go unbeaten and by how many points they win it by.
The frustration for me is that we were entirely predictable in our tactics and frankly, naively Poch appeared to think we could expect to play our game against them, of course we could not and did not.
The game proved beyond a doubt that pace matters, their speed and passing at pace helped take us apart, so the next time you hear anyone argue that pace is irrelevant, just think of this game and how many times it caught us out of position or simply made us look inadequate.
We were lucky, it could easily have been 6, 7 or 8 -1. That was the difference in class between us. You can decide who individually let us down, I cannot see the point as they were better than us abaolutely everywhere, man for man, tactic for tactic.
However, Poch seems to have taken it all in his stride, despite his talk earlier in the season that we should be looking for a Premier League title, this is what he had to say after and played the result down;
‘I think we play 19 teams in the Premier League, no? You see me concerned? Not really, no. It`s about how you finish in the league and position in the table”.
Then in a weird simpleton acceptance he went on to say;
‘Last season, we were above Manchester City in the table. This season, we`re below I don`t want to find an excuse, they won, they were better and they are doing fantastically” .
If you had read my match preview I pointed to what I thought they were capable of – but I hoped that Poch would tactically take a different approach and the fact that he did not and has dismissed this humiliation so easily, and our struggles this season increasingly frustrates me.
Roll on January and opportunity to revamp our squad; but then I can`t see us doing what we need to do anyway, can you?
Maybe now the FA Cup will take on the sort of importance it should, because that is going to be our last best hope for silverware this season.
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