I do think in the most straight up way possible that we don’t create as many decent chances as some people make out. We have passages of lovely football, knocking it around the midfield and into the channels beyond the line etc, but the final ball is usually poor and either goes for a goal kick or straight to the goalkeeper. It’s easy on the eye and the opposition struggle to gain a foothold, but we don’t punish. Taylor is completely isolated 95% of the time and is often running the forward line alone, tussling with centre backs six inches taller than him and with nothing to feed off and nobody close to him. His goals come from when we get people into the box with him and put the ball in and around the six yard box, where it hurts. Even one more player being in there with him takes a marker away and lets him work half a yard of space to operate. The two wide men are going to have to be encouraged to get higher and narrower to make it an actual three in attack. As it stands we just look like we’re playing a 4-1-4-1 or some sort of crafty 4-2-3-1 in disguise. We don’t have a Marcus Browne or a Tariqe Fosu to beat three players and smash one in from 20 yards, or even a Shandon Baptiste to swivel his hips and break through the midfield to drive us on, so we’re going to need to find a way to be effective. No hysteria in any of that - just calm, perfectly reasonable observations.
It is what it is. We can only wait and see if and when it starts to click. Hopefully it does and we can at least start to move up the table a bit, and not get sucked into a season-long battle with the drop. It’s too early to tell what’s what yet, but in another 3/4 games (once we go past 10 or 11 played) it will become clear what the aims should be. Very intriguing next fortnight coming up.
