That Familiar Feeling: Not Quite Good Enough

There’s always a few on here who can find a grain of improvement in the middle of a rough spell, and to be fair I can’t help getting pulled into that thinking myself. You tell yourself it’ll click next week, or the next tweak will lift it, or the next signing will change the mood. Hope does that to you.

But the truth is, the football has been dire for long stretches. Not just the odd off day, but a general feeling of bluntness and slog. Even when you spot a moment that looks like a way out, it rarely becomes a pattern. You get a glimpse, then it’s back to laboured possession, loose decisions, and a lack of edge.

Coaching can’t magic up quality

It’s tempting to pin everything on tactics, because tactics are the bit we can point at. Shape, press, who plays where, who joins the attack. And yes, part of this is tactical. You can see it in how often we look disconnected in transitions, or how rarely we play with real tempo for more than a few minutes.

But in bad times you often land on a simpler, uglier truth: sometimes the squad that’s been assembled just isn’t strong enough, almost regardless of who’s coaching it. Coaching fine tunes talent. It can raise a level, it can organise and sharpen, but it can’t turn a run of 5 or 6 out of 10 performances into a title-winning side all by itself.

We’ve been carried before, and it’s catching up

I look around the team and I can’t shake the feeling that there are a few players who hover around “fine” most weeks, and that’s been the case for a while. The difference is we used to have exceptional levels around them. When you’ve got Mo, Ali and VVD playing at their peak, they drag standards up and cover for a lot. If those heroic levels aren’t there every week, everything else is exposed.

That’s why it feels like more than just form. It feels like the margins have shifted against us. Three or four lads not quite at the required level might be survivable when the rest is elite. When it isn’t, those gaps become the story.

The Houllier deja vu, and why it nags

This is the bit that gives me that deja vu. It’s reminiscent of the Houllier era: a few real talents, some honest pros, but over the longer stretch you could sense we were always a few players short of being proper Premier League winners. Close enough to dream, not complete enough to deliver.

And that’s why this doesn’t feel like entitlement. It’s more a fear of standards slipping quietly, then suddenly you look up and realise you’re rebuilding again. I hope I’m wrong. I’d love nothing more than for this group to prove it’s better than it’s showing.

Written by Hugo Spritz: 9 January 2026