Starting to feel like we might as well fuck the league off this season tbh, 1st-3rd is a complete lock (stupid to think otherwise at this point), and it's hard to see Villa or Chelsea going to Palace and handing them their first win at the ninth time of asking. Honestly, will anyone even really fucking care if we get 4th? We have all seen on multiple occasions now that it is only a springboard to further success if you have an actual long term plan for success, and if you actually adjust your wage structure and transfer budgets to bring in the sort of players who supposedly only want to play for Champions League teams.
There's absolutely no reason, with the resources and squad we have, and the teams we are competing with, that we cannot win the Europa League. Once it's knockouts and 2-legged games start the impact of these "blip" results we seem to be consistently having this season are drastically reduced, as there's always the 2nd leg to make amends. There's not a single team I look at in that league stage and think "if we drew them in a knockout we're fucked". The problem with the domestic cups is how psychologically fucked we are against the bigger teams in the league, we can go as far as we want but if we come up against City, Woolwich, Chavs or Liverpool (especially away), we're going out. Not to mention we can qualify for the CL through the EL anyway so realistically the prize money doesn't really matter, I really, really don't want to see us fielding weakened sides in the knockout stages (assuming we get there which I really think we will) because of "that tough trip to Forest on the weekend". Who fucking cares? We aren't winning the league, we have a better chance in the EL than the domestic cups, I'd just start fielding the weakened teams to prepare for the EL games tbh, fuck the league. 2nd rate competition or not if we won it I'd be over the moon.
More to the point, we've lost to Newcastle and Brighton away, neither of which are terrible results in and of themselves, but both had serious injury issues in those respective games and we failed to capitalise on either situation. Leicester are reliant on the ghost of Jamie Vardy and were without a replacement for Dewsbury-Hall when we played them, yet we let them have a point on the opening day. We are the only team in last season's top 8 (other than Chelsea who had to play City in Maresca's first game in charge) that failed to win their opening game. There have been precious few encouraging signs of picking up unexpected points against top 8 sides under Ange, Villa away last season being really the only outlier (I'm not counting United this season, Ten Hag is a dead man walking), Poch was able to afford the odd glaring result against bottom half sides (because he did have a fair few like this game today) because he was making up the points at home against everyone. We are probably on for 6th if we improve consistency in the league, but again who really gives a monkeys if it's 6th or 8th, wouldn't it make it a much easier pill to swallow with a trophy to stick in the cabinet after sixteen fucking years?