Rafa Benitez has raised an excellent point following Saturday’s uninspiring display at Cardiff, reminding fans that we’ve started poorly in our opening two games over the past last two years but have still enjoyed successful seasons.
There’s been a number of fans raising serious concerns after the nature of Saturday’s performance, but Rafa’s response here really does put it all into perspective – even if the team showed a total lack of discipline, urgency and ideas over the weekend in Wales.
As Rafa points out, we lost our opening two games in the Championship season (losing to Fulham and Huddersfield) yet went on to win the title and also lost our first two last season (losing to Spurs and Huddersfield), yet we managed to turn it around and finish 10th.
Here’s what Rafa’s said when asked about the nature of our performance on Saturday:
“To be fair, you don’t analyse what happens in the past too much. But it’s true; we lost two games in the Championship and then won the league. We also lost the first two last year and finished 10th,”
“So it could be positive for us to have one extra point. We want to win every game though, and especially against those teams who you know will be close to you because they are even more important.
“But, in the end, I think that we were working so hard that we deserved at least a point. And, because we had the chance with the penalty in the final minute, we could have got three points from a very difficult game in which we only had 10 players for a while, we had to change the system and positions because we had problems at right-full-back.
“So we have to be happy with the performance of the team, but still we know we have to improve things.”
It doesn’t hide the fact we were awful on Saturday and we will need to improve considerably if we wish to get anything from upcoming games against Chelsea, City and Arsenal, but this does perhaps bring some much needed perspective into the equation.
Let’s keep calm and trust Benitez and our boys. After all, they’ve ended up delivering when they’ve needed to over the past two seasons – and plenty fans have doubted us..
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Oh well that’s ok then ?
Sharpy17(Quote)
Are you really that deluded mate? In Rafa we trust!!! What a load of garbage. Let’s face it if Rafa was the world class manager that every toon fan thinks he is then every player we have would be giving 110% rather than the ever age 50% they give in most games. In the championship we were more than lucky to win the league. Brighton threw it away. For most of the campaign we were a pretty average team. Last season we were a **** poor team for 70% of the campaign. We managed a couple of wins on the trot that got us away from the relegation battle. Other than that we were a poor team. Unfortunately for Rafa he doesn’t get a lot of choice with the players he brings In but no matter what they should be giving their all week in week out and they don’t so therefore there is major problems at the toon or Rafa isn’t the manager we all want him to be. We played well against spurs yet **** against a team that will struggle this year. It doesn’t make sense. That game with spurs should have kicked us on to a convincing win against Cardiff. But if anything Cardiff were by far the better team. It’s going to be another long long season I think
Danny(Quote)
HAHAHA “Danny”, what’s it like selling any shred of integrity you may have had to work for the lizard KEITH BISHOP in PRETENDING to slag 🙁 off Rafa online and joining the billionaire’s ****** club along with the other pathetic hacks like Andy Gray, Dennis Wise and Richard ‘I now date my daughter’s friend’ Keys? Slime faker pretending to be a Toon fan.
Roger Wittgenstein(Quote)