My honest feeling is that I’m less excited for this year than most of the last few seasons. I feel we had our chance of breaking into the top 4, first when Levy wouldn’t quite back Harry (understandably) when were right at the top at xmas, then when AVB couldn’t work with the new signings to replace Bale.
I hope this changes once we kick off and I at least have the illusion for a bit that we’ll be up there but being objective, Man U are going to be much stronger, Citeh and Chelsea are out of sight and Woolwich won’t be worse even if they’re not miles away from us. Liverpool could conceivably do what we did when we lost Bale but I think they're signings are more proven even if they should fall away from the title race.
My main goal is to see more from Lamela, Soldado and Paulinho, 3 big players who’ve so far done little but shown glimpses that they have more. We also have several ‘borderline’ players who I am interested in seeing if they can step up to being genuinely worthy of a first team slo: Rose, Chiriches, Townsend, Capoue, Holtby, possibly Kane though I’ve more or less decided on him.
I really like our new manager but for some reason I just don’t have the naïve delusion that this is ‘our year’ (which I’ve had nearly every year for the last 10 or so). Realistically, our level is going to be trying to be ‘best of the rest’ and have a good cup run, hopefully with some fun entertaining games along the way.
