O'Neill Takes The Positives From The Blip

Players don't need experience on how to lose!! We need a winning mentality (which should have kicked in for the Stoke game) where you are so determined to win that nothing will get in your way.

Actually, our last good peformance came from our youngsters in Moscow. Since then, we have just seen our so called senior team go from bad to worse!

Let me keep this short and sweet cos I honestly don't think we're far off top four... MON is one of the best managers in league so we're good in that department. We are missing a good left back, good defensive cover for Curtis and Martin (sorry Zat and Carlos) and a creative midfielder (or 2). MON, in the summer please please please do not let any player leave the club (except maybe Zat and Heskey). The team have proved they are good enough to compete at the highest level. We just need 5 quality signings to complement it. Just imagine if we had a vidic, a bridge and a fabregas/arshavin in the team... We'd be looking at top four easy, if not challenging for the title.

Read the interview from Dion Dublin ..... even he has lost faith and thinks that staying in the UEFA cup would have given us the confidence we needed ...."It’s been a poor run of play that’s continued and continued. I think the Stoke game put a needle in their balloon and blew it up," the retired forward told the press. "They’ve set their standards very high, but I’ve said before that they had been quite lucky with late goals and deflected goals." In the wake of Villa's abysmal 5-0 defeat to Liverpool at the weekend, the 39-year-old was asked if he felt that Villa still had a shot at a Champions League place. "Not after that, they were poor," was his reply. "They were thinking ‘How do we come back from this?’. They didn’t know how to turn it around." Dublin also vented his frustrations regarding Martin O'Neill's decision to sacrifice this season's UEFA Cup campaign to focus on the league, stating that challenging for a European final would have boosted player confidence. "We plainly know now that it was the wrong decision to go about it as he did," added Dublin. "I would have gone for the trophy. When you get so close to something why would you fob it off and then go for the league? "Take what you’ve got, try and win the cup and then see what happens with the league. "The league is very important but if you can get a bit of silverware or get into a final that’s got to be good for the team and their confidence."

Only 5 new players? Why that's half a team and yet we are very close to the top 4? Sorry, fail to see the logic here although I do agree that we need better players. Look at the top four teams - and ask how many of our players would get in their sides? Do we have a really top striker? One or even two solid CBs and a strong midfielder like Fabregas, Gerrard, Lampard or even Arteta/ Cahill? Answer is no we don't. Thanks to a highly motivated team we did well and now we are being found out. Yes the team is better than under Dol, it is moving in the right direction but not as quickly as pre-slip results implied.

Hopefully Mart will have learned from the mistakes he has made too. The slump is not all down to the players, far from it. This ridiculous game plan of continually playing two, three, four players out of their natural and preferred positions, is wrong, so wrong. There's no genuine balance. Nicky Shorey highlights my complaint. This has to be a 'personality' thing between O'Neill and the player. Shorey is a more than capable/competent left full back, who has been banished to the bench, and given no opportunity to re-establish himself. It defies belief.