The Storm

Since August I have generally tried to maintain a sort of reasoned optimism. I told myself that staying in the Premier League is a big ask. Almost every other team in the division has been working with a bigger budget for at least half a decade. They have had longer to hone squads appropriate to the level, their players have had more games to gain experience, nous and composure in top division football in England and elsewhere.

The challenge, I told myself, is enormous, but a team in our situation does have advantages. Any club promoted without parachute payments has already done something exceptional. The people in charge of the club have shown their ability to produce outcomes wildly outstripping their resources. Some combination of novel off field structure, skilled recruitment, coaching and matchday tactics must have given us an edge over competitors.

I knew we were always going to be under-powered for the division, but reasoned our 2023-24 wage bill would leave budget headroom that rivals wouldn’t have, allowing us to build. We certainly spent enough to give ourselves a shot at survival, more than most recent Premier League newcomers. The conclusion of this internal dialogue was that with a fair wind, we’d have a decent chance of staying up.

Unfortunately, the trouble with football supporters is that we’re absurdly wedded to hope, so the tendency with “reasoned optimism” is you keep the optimism and abandon the reason.

What counts as a fair wind? Top of the list would be staying relatively free of key injuries. There’s always a lot of chat every transfer window about building squad depth but for me there’s only so much you can do. The more you look to stretch your budget across 25 players, the less money available for your best players and the lower your first team’s ceiling will be. In the real world teams with lots of injuries are just going to be worse, that’s how it is. And if you had less quality to start with, that will probably mean untenably bad.

What else? A fair wind would have been most of our recruitment working out reasonably well, especially the marquee acquisitions. That meant our big investments staying fit, staying in the team and contributing at least somewhere near to expectations, even if not at the levels of our wildest dreams. When you’ve recruited 12 new players, at least 10 implicitly as first team starters, you want to be feeling good about at least two thirds of them.

Lastly, a fair wind was finishing on the right side of at least a middling number of fine margins. Not that you win every week with a massive deflection, an outrageously favourable refereeing decision or a catastrophic opposition error, just that if you’re in even games you’re getting a good share of the spoils and although occasionally you’re getting robbed of some merited points, you’re also committing your own thefts from time to time.

I think it’s safe to say we have been sailing into headwinds in all three areas so far this season. First the big thing that’s (mostly) out of our control – injuries. As of mid-November, we were officially the second most injury prone team in the division, as measured by first team players unavailable for the most amount of time. Axel Tuanzebe and George Hirst are the most obvious misses. Our defensive record with the former is excellent and Hirst gave us the option to manage Liam Delap’s workload with virtually no drop off. Then there’s the less obvious ones. Chieo Ogbene has that Premier League physicality that looked sorely lacking against Forest and Palace and that has often been found wanting in the latter stages of games (not least on Sunday).

That’s just the long-term injuries. Ben Johnson, Harry Clarke, Jacob Greaves, Kalvin Phillips, Jen Cajuste, Jack Taylor, Massimo Luongo, Nathan Broadhead, Wes Burns, Sam Morsy and Ali Al-Hamadi have all missed time in matches and in training that will have hampered their ability to find good form or forge good partnerships.

One result of this is that we’ve spent this three-game week trying to manage players through big workloads or unfamiliar rotations or returns from injury. We had a different right back start each fixture, Cajuste and Taylor awkwardly shared minutes, whilst our oldest player Morsy started and finished all three games. We swapped returning absentee Greaves in for a match-up with Jean-Philippe Mateta for which Cameron Burgess might have been better suited. We’ve had to flog our three best young players. Liam Delap and Omari Hutchinson completed 250 of 270 minutes in seven days, Davis all 270. In the wider forward roles, two starts by the very effective Sammie Szmodics had to be leavened with the seemingly nervous and indecisive Jack Clarke, while Wes Burns and Conor Chaplin took shifts playing wherever Omari wasn’t.

None of this is ideal.

Injuries are one major contributing factor in our second headwind. You suspect that Johnson, Greaves, Cajuste, Phillips and Ogbene were all signed to start games more often than not and all have lost substantial time. That’s nearly half of our Summer signings struggling to get rhythm or form (or permanently unavailable in Ogbene’s case), including the two with the greatest experience in the Premier League.

Johnson looked accomplished against Leicester and Spurs, then missed a few. Greaves looked class then missed a chunk. Cajuste had to work up to being available and doesn’t seem to have 90 minutes in him yet. Kalvin Phillips has had periods in games where he looked ready to dominate proceedings, culminating in looking the part (but getting sent off) against Leicester, before disappearing with a mystery ankle injury. He now enigmatically remains on our subs bench in scenarios where he would surely be useful.

The rest of the twelve includes one signed with the hope he’d be involved as little as possible (Conor Townsend), Jack Clarke, who I think it’s fair to say has not yet met our expectations for him and Aro Muric, who is excellent in all aspects of modern goalkeeping except one of the most important ones – decision-making. That leaves us with four that have broadly met or exceeded expectations – Omari Hutchinson, Dara O’Shea, Sammie Szmodics and Liam Delap. Of late, even Delap and Hutchinson have looked hamstrung by their workloads.

Not a viable hit rate.

How far you think we’ve been hard done-by in terms of outcomes and performances is in the eye of the beholder. What I think is undeniable is that we have left a lot of points on the table that the balance of play has put within our grasp. We have drawn three home games (Fulham, Villa, Man U) where we finished in the ascendancy and one more where we were clearly superior until a debatable sending off. We lost two games in their dying embers because of almost inexplicable goalkeeping errors. We lost two further tight encounters to single goals.

Now, I know every fan tots up their mis-fortunes like this, forgetting anything that went their way. Brighton were superior to us in every way bar the scoresheet. Southampton were good value for their 1-0 win and we didn’t really merit our late deflected equaliser. Spurs might have equalised late on. That is to say it wouldn’t have taken much more going wrong for us to be sat here bottom of the league with 5 points and 0 wins. Equally, I don’t think the mid-point between us getting all the fine margins and none of them is 1 win and 9 points.

Not a lot of help from the fates.

Now, the intention of this blog is not a form of special pleading. The league table is not lying and we are in a scenario of our own making. Nobody forced us to conduct our Summer transfer business in the way that we did and “fine margins” is often fancy talk for screwing up or just not getting the job done. Whilst it is certainly true that we could have taken 4 points from our last two home games by just managing a couple of moments more, we didn’t and both Palace and Bournemouth were clearly superior to us. Nothing about the statistics underlying our drift into the relegation zone really speak to a team that deserves to be higher than 18th.

This is no call to feel sorry for ourselves. It is a reminder, to myself more than anyone, that my reasoned assessment was that we would have a decent chance of staying up if we got a fair wind. As it happens, we have sailed into something of a perfect storm – injuries, recruitment struggles, tripping over almost each and every fine margin we can find. So, recovering my reason, why should I be surprised at where we find ourselves?

The last week has revealed we probably aren’t good enough to stay up in the face of these gale force winds. Rationally, we were never likely to be. Yet, rational self-preservation still isn’t enough to sweep away my optimism. Even now, there’s something in this team that still insists to me that we have a chance. It rears its head from time to time, against Spurs and Man U and for most of Bournemouth. Whilst we wait for clearer skies, we just have to hope those winds don’t sweep us away entirely and that we’re still upright, still together, can still believe, if and when anything starts to turn our way.

Conor Chaplin v Bournemouth

Goals 1

Shots 5

Accurate passes 27/36 (75%)

xG 0.48

xGOT 0.65

Shot accuracy 1/3 (33%)

Blocked shots 2

Touches 53

Touches in opposition box 4

Successful dribbles 1/1 (100%)

Passes into final third 3

Accurate crosses 0/2

Dispossessed 2

Tackles won 1/2 (50%)

Blocks 1

Defensive actions 4

Ground duels won 3/5 (60%)

Aerial duels won 1/3 (33%)

Was fouled 0

Fouls 1