Well, I had high hopes of this season. I really did. Reset, new players, new coach, renewed hunger in Pep. Anger and hunger in the players.
There's just no way to dress that one up. The most disturbing thing to me is that it was eerily like our games in our worst period last season. Trundling along, more or less dominating a match, maybe leading, against a team playing worse than us. You could see the holes in our game, but we were being let off by the poorness of the opposition. Until we weren't. (I'm not talking about the good teams — Liverpool, Arsenal, Real, they all just smashed us, from first to last). Then completely folding like a wafer in the second half or the last fifteen minutes of the second half. Being sliced through repeatedly, at will, by a team that we had more or less managed for 45 minutes or so. Please don't say it's this player or that player. And please, enough with this boring mantra about the RB situation. Yes, we do need a better right back. We could get the best right-back in the world, and it wouldn't change a fucking thing about today.
There is a problem with the whole team and its attitude. It's not this or that player.
We should have gone hell-for-leather and killed that game in the first half when Brighton were playing really poorly. And in other times, we would have.
The stats are damning. We continued to control possession. We always do. Win or lose. But Brighton had one shot — one — on or off target for the whole of the first half. They then had six shots on target and several off in the second half. They completely turned the shots on/off target tally round. But for some blindingly good saves by Trafford, that's a thrashing today. Brighton are not prime Barcelona. They are a useful team. Two, three, four seasons back we were going one-nil up against teams like that, then compounding it with a second late in the first half or in the second half, and then quietly managing out the game.
There is a fundamental problem with nearly the whole team and its attitude.