Why can't he just accept that it's his decisions which are costing us? Either he knows and doesn't have the bollocks, or he has no clue he's doing anything wrong and is just thick. If the latter, someone needs to fucking tell him!
Posted this on YNWA.tv earlier. Too many times this season have we gone 1-0 up only for our players to decide thats all we need and stop playing. We've seen many a game where we completely dominate the opposition for the first 20-45 minutes then completely change and look disinterested. I don't think you can necessarily blame Rafa for the sudden change in attitude of the team in those games. That lineup he put out today was good enough to beat Wigan and an on form Torres would have put us ahead early on. We created and controlled the game for the opening period, only to go soft in the second half and invite pressure on ourselves.
Now I don't know if Rafa tells our players to stop attacking, but it would be pretty daft giving our current record of giving away dodgy set pieces (and for today a peno) in the last ten minutes, therefore I'm willing to bet he doesn't. We sent an unchanged side out there for the second half, but the attitude and attacking intent was MASSIVELY different.
It comes a point when the bottle, and desire of the players has to be called into question. I will admit though that Rafa's sub of Gerrard for Keane was daft. The only thing I can think is maybe he was trying to show confidence in Keane by having him come on for our best player. Gerrard is the one player who KNOWS he's good regardless of if he's rested after scoring a hat trick or not, therefore it's a low risk move to take him off because the guy doesn't lose confidence in himself. If we had more players with Gerrard's attitude we'd have converted a good portion of those draws into wins. Torres is another one like him, but hasn't been able to really go this season, because of the injury woes.
The reason we have Sammy Lee is to motivate the players to give it their all for the club, the reason we have Rafa is to place our players in the best position to win football matches.
After reading the interview it's clear that Rafa is furious with the way we played second half. He's not blaming anyone but our own team. The second half was crazy in that, we completely fucking bottled it as a collective unit. We had them dominated and shackled for 45 minutes of football and let them back into it in the 2nd 45. Even with that, we still only conceded in the last 10 minutes do to our defense deciding to maraud forward for no reason. Arbeloa and Aurelio I understand, and Skrtel on the Halfway line to win headers OK I can see the reasoning, but Carra should be NOWHERE NEAR the opposition half in that situation. He's not generally a goal threat, and being our #1 cb needs to stay back to deal with situations like that. Lucas should not have been the first one back there, yes it was a dumb challenge to just barge in like that in the box, but Lucas is young and will learn, had he got the ball we'd all be praising his hard work and effort.
I don't even want to get started on Keane.
