Lillehamring

I'm sorry, but you'll have to dig out some quotes to back this claim up - 1 or 2 maybe, but most managers we've beaten will have been glad not to have been beaten by a truck load. Ipswich, unlike us, have settled players and management, plus massive momentum from their promotion - we're matching them but coming from a totally opposite position. QPR aren't as bad as their league position suggests and were playing for their manager's job, so not necessarily the easy game it might have seemed. The players aren't getting 'lost' with the system, they're still learning it!

depends on how you define unconvincing - by and large we've controlled most games, and really just toyed with some opponents. if you're looking for your runaway leader to be winning by 3+ goals every game, then you're talking about a very rare thing in this sport.

13 out of 16 seems pretty 'sustained' to me. As a tactic it should have been enough to get points from all the games we've lost - sometimes , though, it's not the game plan but the appication of it that fails.

Fine margins are to be expected when teams come into the games with no intention of trying to beat us. We've even seen teams go 1-0 down against us and then carry on with their timewasting.

We have to remember that this is a really new team, with few players having played together, playing a new system under new management, with a manager who has little experience of this league (none as a manager) - many people didn't expect us to be winning games until this time of year - that these games have been tight isn't something we'll plan for it's just the nature of the game, we're not a team that does more than it needs to, playing against teams that are on a damage limitation mission. If you're worried just remember how many 1-goal games we won last year.

That's debatable - there's no win where we haven't deserved to win or where we've 'robbed' the points. We've had lucky moments (as we've had unlucky moments) but no case where we've come away and thought we didn't deserve to win. And this whole business of having 'rodgers' synonymous with 'bad management' is a bit pathetic - especially in a tactics thread - if you think that enzo is making the same mistakes that rodgers did, then expand on that - what did rodgers do that was shit that enzo is now also doing?

But you have to look at it that this IS the system, the players that don't quite fit are just what we have available, we have to consider them as placeholders for the next transfer window. remember we had to bring in a tonne of players and couldn't bring in all the players we wanted or needed. We should just be pleased that these guys are outperforming their natural abilities.

Wow, even if you disregard his results as 'lucky', it's still way too early to right him off.

There's a difference between 'forecasting a defeat' and trying to keep our feet on the ground. I don't think it's a case of him knowing best - it's a case of having managed 16 games and trying to keep some consistency and to, let's face it, get Plan A to stick before he starts trying to introduce modifications to the system.

We have top quality strikers we're just not getting them good enough chances, and when we do, they're not playing to their abilities. It's a collective issue, but given how new this team and system is, it's going to take time for things to work as they should.

And yet still contrived to lose to Stoke and draw with Rotherham respectively.... ipswich have also failed to keep a clean sheet their last four games, leeds have 1 CS in their last 6. We weren't great against boro and we were poor against Leeds - but they're no more dangerous than we are.

If leeds' attack is so good, how come their single goal was from a very badly defended corner? Their xG in that game was 1.4 ours was 0.94 - I'd hardly class that as 'weak'

I see you skilfully avoid considering defending in your 'assessment'. If Ipswich go up defending the way they do they are much more likely to struggle that if we go up defending the way we do - considering they have conceded twice as many goals as us. I'm sure if you look at the majority of teams that go up and survive, it's because they can defend rather than they can score. Oddly, despite this lunacy of a thread we can defend AND score goals.

But they didn't have the same game plan at all - leeds pressed us to death, boro sat and tried to play us on the counter. They only team that has played remotely like Leeds were sunderland, who we beat.

I think we need to keep some perspective - most fans were talking about october/november as when they expected us to start looking like we'd worked out the system - we've achieved so much so soon, and yet i don't think we're even close to being ready for 'fine' tuning, i think we're still at the tuning stage, but because, yes, we have a superior set of players, the ongoing process isn't really slowing us down. The goals thing is weird, we've scored more than anyone but Ipswich, without, unlike Ipswich, sacrificing defensive solidity - so i'm not sure that it's an issue in general, but it does feel like, yes, we should be scoring more.

Ipswich have also conceded more than twice as many goals as us - there's a trade off for the way that they play. Failing to score in three of 16 games isn't terrible, it's not like in any of the games we didn't have opportunity to score. That we have failed to score in the three games we have lost has little to do with the way teams set up against us: Hull essentially parked the bus, boro sat relatively deep & Leeds went with a super high press,. Most teams we have played have set up like hull and boro did and we have beaten them and scored plenty of goals. Equally, sunderland set up similar to leeds and we beat them. so, no the lack of goals is down, in the main, to our poor finishing and the woodwork.

Hull we had 21 attempts at goal, leeds 10, boro 12 - sure they're not all going to go in, but when you have that many shots there's no excuse for not getting something from a game. We hit the post in each of those games - so were talking inches away from scoring (which is not unfair to describe as unlucky). The Messlier save in the last minute, again we're talking inches away from a goal, given the timing there'd have been no coming back from that. Again - the original argument is that we've been 'sussed out' - which is nonsense. Don't confuse 'chances to win' with 'dominating the opposition' - neither of the last two games did we put in a performance of the highest standard - we weren't bad, but equally we've been better, and yet, but for the with of the woodwork we could have come away with points - so, no, this isn't about us suddenly being easy to beat, it's about us not sustaining the focus of the previous 14 games, or being clinical enough with the numerous chances we created.

I'm hoping Yunus will be back by then - not that enzo seems to trust him in that position, although i'm sure casadei can do a job if his good self turns up.

We can cope with being pressed - doesn't mean we'll always win, though. Sunderland pressed as much as anyone has and we did enough to win.

I like to think that it's just a stage on our learning curve - it's easy to forget how new this team is. To be honest, if Leeds and Boro are the third and fifth favourites to win the league, i'm not that worried, they both looked like they'll get beaten more often than we will this season, and that's there's no one we should really fear this season.

Sure - and the last two games are against two of the better teams in the division; i'm prepared to accept that other teams are capable, my concern is that we still should have had enough to combat them - as i posted elsewhere, leeds doubling up on our wingers should have allowed us to overload the middle and get the #8s and nacho/vardy in the box, but we didn't really adapt, we just sort of carried on going wide until the last 10 minutes or so.

Yeah - regardless of the approach play the philosophy is based around 'getting bodies in the box' and we simply haven't been doing that enough in the last four games.

Yes, doubling up on our wingers should have been something we capitalized on - we have no madders, sure, but between the wingers we had KDH, Vardy & casadei/ricardo - that switch from leeds should have been a key for us to press the middle - which we did towards the end but it wasn't enough or of a good enough quality. Again, going back to the original point - we haven't been found out, teams are having the odd bit of joy tactically, but these losses aren't the result of us being 'found out'.

Well, yes, but at the same time we were teased with the idea that plan A was so flexible we wouldn't need a Plan B. That if they went narrow, we went wide; if they pressed our CMs we'd play through it, if they pressed fully, we'd go more direct. It's still early days, but we seem to have become a little uninspired and one dimensional just lately; patience for patience sake.