At half time I was chatting with a friend over a much needed beer. This person hasn't been to many games since the rebrand and whose interest in the club has been a passing one until yesterday, when they said it was the first time since the red shirt that they had got the old feelings back about the club. The reason I mention this is that the person hasn't generally been interested enough in watching the side with any sort of regularity, even last season in the PL.

The comments, or questions that I heard at half time from them were "why can't we pass the ball and keep it on the floor?" "how poor are some of our players?" "there's no pace" and so the deconstruction of our players continued. My response was that this was a better performance than we often get. I was told that we'd played better football in the bottom division when we last went up.

I thought this was an interesting analysis. To me, I saw some minor improvements. To the other person, they hadn't got used to seeing the usual dross we serve up and our performance came as a shock.