Originally Posted by
the other bob wilson
I used the term "fickle fan", but I accept that there is a level of hypocrisy in what I said - that's something that I made clear in my very first paragraph. However, that's what being a fan is all about - when your reaction to a game depends entirely on its result, you are always going to struggle to get balanced and sensible responses.
Even so, just as "passing the ball for fun" sides sometimes paint themselves into a corner by relentlessly sticking to those principles, I believe that Neil Warnock is guilty of the same sort of thing but from an entirely different viewpoint.
It's all very well saying that Watford are the best of the rest this season and Everton are a top ten side, but that was Watford's biggest ever Premier League win on Friday and last night was only the fourth time in the last five seasons that Everton have won away from home by a margin of three goals or more. Therefore, we are not talking about sides that used to winning in the manner that they have done in Cardiff in the past week - for me, they were both helped on the way by the fact that their opponents were nowhere near Premier League quality in fundamental aspects of the game. I've heard Neil Warnock talk about getting the basics right, but I don't see how he can ever make this claim about us a Premier League club when we pass the ball like we do - passing the ball over a pretty small distance to a colleague is a "basic" of the game that we come up short in on too many occasions.
It may have been an excellent piece of defending by Digne to prevent us scoring in the first minute, but the point has to be that, from such a position, he shouldn't have been given a prayer of preventing a goal and he wouldn't have been if we had been able to perform Premier League standard "basics".