That's it. We take the lead then we just seem to stop the intensity thinking that's it job done. Once you do that it's hard to pick it up again
Yep, mentality is a strange thing in sport, once you’ve switched off, it’s really difficult to switch on again.
I was a boxer all my childhood and teens and when I was fighting in some junior competitions, I knew the first couple of fights might be fairly straight forward and being young and stupid, I had the mentality I could just breeze through and then you find yourself in a much more difficult fight than you expected and you can’t just flick a switch and turn it on completely and it’s a big struggle to get through something that didn’t need to be.
That’s what I’ve been seeing in some games when we take the lead. We go flat and then can’t seem to get back into gear.
But I have no idea why, because these are top level footballers that have played hundreds of games, so they must know that when you only have one goal lead, you are far from safe. You only need to be a casual fan of football to understand that, never mind actually playing at the top level.
We need to rectify that and we will be okay
We showed in the Arsenal game that we are better than all these teams when the mentality is right, so there’s no need for us to be handing chances to the likes of Nottingham Forest to get back into games. If they do on their own accord, then fair play, but mostly it’s been us going flat and allowing it too.
