To suggest that we’ve been average all season is just blatantly incorrect. I agree that we’ve not been consistently good enough, and there’s definitely been a drop off in performances from mid-October, but to suggest we’ve been bang average is overly harsh in my opinion.
I was at that Spurs game and I remember leaving saying that’s as good as I’ve ever seen us play away at a real rival (rival in the positional sense not historical,) with the exception of the United 4-1 in 09. I honestly can’t remember any better than that in terms of sheer dominance, we absolutely bossed them, 2-1 was ridiculously flattering, and whilst I take the point that Spurs themselves haven’t been brilliant this season, it’s still their best ever league start, and it took Lamela missing a sitter for City to win there.
The results at Chelsea and Arsenal are good on paper, but, especially with the Arsenal game I can see the case for 2 points lost. We didn’t play well at Arsenal and it took them to be at 100% and an 82nd minute equaliser for them to get a draw - I realise football isn’t always as linear as this but you have to feel if we’d heen anywhere near our best we’d have won. Chelsea is one of them where you probably take it but again, we could have won that as we missed a lot of chances second half.
The thing to remember is this team is still getting to their peak, we were distinctly worse than bang average at this point last season (well not quite at this exact point as it was around now we’d started to find out groove,) but to be where we are in the league now having played how we have can only be a good thing.
As a final point, and I’ve made this point all season, I can’t think of any games we’ve played, domestically or in Europe, where the result has been different from what I felt was a fair reflection of what happened on the pitch. That doesn’t mean we’ve always played well, we deserved to lose against Napoli and Red Star for sure, and just because we were good enough to beat the likes of Huddersfield and Leicester doesn’t suggest we were brilliant, but what it does do is dispel the conception that the luck has to run out, as I really don’t think we’ve been lucky, underwhelming at times, absolutely, but lucky, no.