Complacency

Funny. I'd talked about complacency before, and Le Boss now has his take on it:

“It is not complacency. We just have to continue to play in a rigorous way, respect the game we love and the pass. That is what we forgot sometimes and we have paid for it."

“We play at top quality and at the moment we do not get rewarded for what we produce.

“In the Champions League it can happen that you are 1-0 up and are caught on a free-kick in the last minute. Today it has not to happen. At 2-0 we lost the way we want to play the game. And when a team comeback to 2-1 and you are away from home you are always under threat to go to 2-2.”

Don't know about people out there, but I've been though since being a wee little boy, and especially now as an adult, that the word "deserve" means nothing, except when it comes to punishment and pain you deserve. Otherwise, nobody deserves anything - in the positive sense. Our reward for the game we played was exactly what we got. 1 point. At times, I felt we could even have lost it completely, so I'm not even going to suggest we "deserved" all 3 as just reward.

As tele-pundit Kumar has put it, I can only hope that behind these niceties, he's giving the team an absolutely arse-ripping over the last two games.

All said and done, you've gotta love the EPL. It's really all up from grabs now, and anything really can happen. Which is great, and you'd only hope your own team doesn't fall prey to the weird and wonderful. But we have. Already. Thrice this season. Fuck. There'll probably be much more.

I'd say that it's probably our form away from home that will worry me more this season. We will ship the occasional stupid goal at home. See: Pompey, Birmingham, Blackburn, but we'll probably score more against these likes. But I won't be so sure with the bigger teams. But we will also ship more than the occasional stupid goal away, and this time, I won't be so sure we'll eb able to respond. See Citeh, Man U and now West Ham.

I won't criticise the defenders per se. They've done a marvellous job in themselves. But it's the system that has been set up for them, and Wenger will have to tighten it up quite a bit more. 4-3-3's great as far as the goals are concerned, but two areas to work on are defending as a team as much as attacking as a team, and cutting out all that shit 50% complacency shit.

Le Boss has got that wrong. Well, either it's complacency or we're just not good enough to beat West Ham. Go figure.