- Jan 18, 2011
- 7,978
- 9,435
Do you honestly think the team is anywhere near their previous standards? Key players like Dele, Kane, Vertonghen, Son and Toby are light years away from the form they showed when we were ripping up the CL. As you say we've also lost Eriksen - the single most important player to the way we played. N'Dombele doesn't even count - he's not only not superior on form to any of our previous players, the guy isn't even playing. Lo Celso is brilliant and Bergwijn shows promise - those two do not make up for the massive degradation of the squad, and we absolutely do not play anything like the same way we did when Poch's teams were smashing the likes of Madrid.
We're only arguably stronger on paper if you're playing Football Manager and you're basing everything off player stats. We are not the same team we were and I'm not sure why you'd think we are?
Didn't you see us in the CL this year? We absolutely scraped through most games and got roundly smashed a total of 14 - 3 by two German teams. We are nowhere near the level required to be able to make any sort of success of a CL campaign as well as the PL and domestic cups.
We have absolutely no chance of winning 7 in a row this season and we'll be nowhere near the CL spots.
I'm not sure what football you've been watching this year but it sounds like your season has gone a lot better than mine.
Why do you think that is? They just suddenly lost all their skill? I don't think so - for me we lost our mojo, our confidence. That's what we had last season that we miss this season. Even with Eriksen for half a season we weren't playing well, so that's not the critical variable. I think Lo Celso adequately replaces him anyway.
Our players are plenty good enough. Sure some upgrades would be nice. But if you compare our team to Wolves, Arsenal, Sheffield, Leicester - we're miles better. I wouldn't trade our squad for Arsenal's in a million years, and that's not because of bias. In terms of quality players we're around the United/Chelsea level (and a bit better than Chelsea before their additions of Werner and Ziyech imo).
Point is to say that we don't belong in the Champions league when we're the current runner ups with mostly the same squad is fairly ridiculous imo. I get that sentiment is negative right now but some perspective is needed.