- Aug 5, 2006
- 3,361
- 3,356
I'm not twisting your words or being confrontational mate. I'm really not interested in a slagging match.No, I didn't misunderstand a thing, actually. But I do see that you enjoy twisting my words. Nobody said that fans expect a 10 point lead to Arsenal. However, once we are in such a wonderful position, there is the expectation to not waste that gap instantly, which I think is a very fair and quite down to earth expectations. Fan's expectations aren't too high, and even if they are, that's not the main problem. "Oh, just bring the right type of fans, and everything else is fine" is an absolutely nonsensical approach and speaks of 1) either disrespect for other fans or 2) that one is handsomely positioned on the club's pay roll.
The 10 point thing is exactly what I'm talking about... the idea of expectations being based on a variable frame of context. I completely agree that at the start of the season none of us probably expected that we would create a 10 point gap. But the fact that we did create that gap shouldn't reset our field of view to the point where the 10 point gap is the minimum expectation.
Arsenal won their three games around the NLD, so in order to maintain that 10 point gap we would have had to beat Burnley, Chelsea and Southampton all away from home. That's fine as a "hope for" situation and I think you could go as far to say 4-6 points from 9 would be a reasonable expectation. But winning all three games is not a realistic expectation in my view.
The gap disappeared so quickly partly due to us playing poorly and partly due to the way the fixtures fell. The gap between Liverpool and City closed in a similar fashion. So I think it's more productive to be viewing the situation as after 30 games we have created a 1 point gap rather than being drawn in to a very small frame of context.
Put another way... had we taken those defeats early in the season and never created that 10 point gap in the first place - even more so if we had come from behind Arsenal in recent weeks to move 1 point ahead - we would probably view being 1 point ahead in a very different light. That's what I mean when I talk about the context of our expectations.
But anyway, this is a thread about how the club spends money so it's going to end up the same way all these threads do. I thought Saoirse wrote a really good post talking about why the Burnley and Southampton losses (plus Wolves, Watford and even United) feel so much more galling than they would have done even 5 years ago and I was agreeing with him by disagreeing with you, that's all.