The negativity on this board is ludicrous!

[the other bob wilson]

To be blunt Bob, when you are fighting to overcome a pretty disastrous run of results the football is not going to be pretty as you attempt to regain confidence in your play by scrapping to get back on track. We're starting to do this but it'll take time to become more fluid in our forward movement.

I'm really disappointed in a lot of comments on this thread as I hadn't realised we'd got such a bunch of depressives on here - and you've surprised me most of all given how long you've been watching us.

The other point I'll make is that you play to your strengths and the things that have been working for you. I think we'd get absolutely battered in most games if we tried to outplay other teams in areas that are their strengths. Passing is not something we've ever been good at since I've watched Cardiff - honourable exclusions to this include Whitts and one or two others but they had other flaws to their games. You are clutching at straws if you think Gunnarsson has ever been a good passer and it's an absolute given he'll be even worse when he returns from long-term injury.

The one point I will agree with is that we need to be more in control of where the long balls are going when we're playing them out. It does seem to me that we're now aiming at Patterson a lot more from goal kicks and he is excellent at winning the headers from those balls.

I'm enjoying our football this season and I think that we'll rediscover a more fluid team game over the next few weeks. Whether that will be enough we'll have to wait and see but it's already been a season where I've seen better football from us as a team than I have in many years. I'd have thought that would have been enough to cut the side some slack but apparently not. Seems a number of our fans have 'Premiership supporter' disease already.

Once again, there is the assumption.that anyone who expresses criticism at the way we have been playing for long stretches of many of our matches since November is advocating we play"pretty, tippy, tappy" football. Maybe some are, but I'm certainly not - we'll never do that under this manager and we'd be hopeless at it if we did. However, there are more than two ways of playing football. For example, there's the way we played earlier this season and in the second half of 16/17.

We were on our run of consecutive wins at the start of the season when I first noticed one of those awful spells when we seemed incapable of playing any sort of controlled football. We started the QPR match awfully and soon went a goal down, but we came through well to record a fifth straight win and by the end we were worth more than a 2-1 win. By and large, we were able to cope with these spells where we just seemed to stop playing, but we were awful for forty five minutes against Norwich in early December before coming back strongly in the second half and since that night, I can remember a good finish at Reading, a good second half against Sunderland and a performance reminiscent of our early season form at Leeds, but, apart from that, its been a struggle in the league for us.

I'm concerned that this decline will end up costing us the top six place which looked a certainty just before Christmas - I reckon we were playing a lot better a year ago than we are now.