Tin Helmets On

Some defeats just leave you numb. Roughly 300 seconds of football and you are walking out of the ground like you’ve just been disintegrated. It’s March 9th now. There is a circulatory system walking out of the Away End at the Cardiff City Stadium.

Like Jon Osterman/Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen, I needed time to re-embody myself. Everyone has a process for this. I was at the game with Steve, a Town fan since the 1970s and so optimistic by nature that he even predicted we’d score again after Rotherham equalised last week. He was just muttering “I thought we had so much control second half” over and over again. His son Josh, a more phlegmatic soul, was lamenting some of the passes that hadn’t quite come off and the way that forced us back in stoppage time, picking the bones out of our tactics.      

My process was to give Cardiff a bit of credit for pushing us back late in the game, then to start listing reasons why actually this was OK. We have won six in our last seven. We are third against all expectations. We have a frankly absurd 78 points from 37 games. We weren’t going to win our last 16 games straight. These things happen. Well, defeats do. We seem to have some special arrangement with the universe where we get to smash every other team in the league most weeks, in exchange for one absolute melt down in stoppage time per season. I walked out of Charlton Athletic 4 Ipswich Town 4 last season telling myself nothing like this would happen to us ever again.

Once I had become almost entirely corporeal again, I did attempt a bit of rational thought and a search for comforting statistics. Why did that happen? Has it happened before? Will it happen again? Obviously that specific thing, where we concede two goals in five minutes of extra time is a bit weird, but the general theme where you try to defend a lead and have to don tin helmets whilst the opposition rain artillery on you for a bit is pretty common in football.

As you might expect of a team that’s won 23 out of 37 games, we are actually pretty good at dealing with these situations. You don’t win that many football matches if you crumble any time you’re put under a bit of pressure. We’ve had to defend a one-goal lead during stoppage time 19 times and we’ve won 17 of them. We don’t obviously have an issue holding our nerve. The two games immediately prior to Cardiff, we’d looked as comfortable defending our leads as I’ve ever seen us.

In our four other defeats, we managed to screw up early rather than late, Leeds (twice), West Brom and Preston all did most of their damage before the clock struck 30.00. In our 9 draws, 2 featured clean sheets and 6 saw us scoring the last goal of the day. Only Rotherham at the New York Stadium managed to peg us back late from an ascendant position.

But what about the defending more generally, Jack? Well, we’ve conceded a lot of goals for a team in 3rd. We’ve only given up one fewer than QPR in 20th. What’s the pattern there? I think it’s worth dividing these between home and away. We are a different animal in different places. At home, our defensive record looks pretty dire. Only Blackburn (30) and Plymouth (32) have managed worse than our 29. But you do have to take our performances holistically. We’re gung-ho at home and that’s a risk-reward thing, you can’t get the relentless attacking play without the vulnerability at the back. Ultimately 20 of those goals didn’t cost us anything because we won the game anyway. Of the other 9 not many particularly resemble our Cardiff debacle, Leeds (4), Norwich (1), West Brom (2) and Leicester (1) all scored in quick transitions, as you might expect an away team against an attacking juggernaut to do. Only Norwich’s second goal, a loose ball fired in by Jonny Rowe, was even vaguely a “tin helmets” situation, though all three of the goals scored by Rotherham might also fit the description.

Away from home we are the second-best defence in the league, conceding 20 in 19 games (it was just the solitary goal per game before Saturday). Prior to the weekend our issue was early goals not late ones. No one had managed to beat us without scoring in the first fifteen minutes. After a late scare against Sunderland on matchday one, Rotherham was the only time we’d conceded even vaguely late. Astonishingly, Huddersfield Town taking the lead in the 61st minute at the John Smith Stadium was the third latest away goal we’d given up all season. Whatever we’re doing to shut down games works astonishingly well. There you go, absolutely nothing to worry about.

And just like that, I’ve put myself back together again.