Asking for trouble, stale tactics, lacking ambition, Carlos’ job security and unexpected stats ‐ Notes on the draw with Coventry

Despite getting a draw against one of the league’s better teams on Saturday, I was left with a bitter taste after sitting through the game. Despite Town’s respectable league position, alarm bells are ringing for many fans and it feels like we’re a team on the slide. 

Coventry played fairly well but most teams would have when their opponent allowed them so much time on the ball and space to get away shots at will. Had Coventry been slightly clinical with their finishing we could have been hammered in this game. Though if Matty Pearson had nodded home his straightforward chance in the second half we would almost certainly have gone on to win, so it’s not worth dwelling on hypothetical too much. 

Here are a few more of my thoughts on the game:

Defending a lead badly 

The thing I found most frustrating about this game was how obviously flawed it was to try and cling on to a single-goal lead. The equaliser didn’t come as a shock but the inevitable conclusion to Coventry’s growing pressure on the Town goal. The only surprise was that they scored so late there wasn’t enough time remaining for them to push on and get the winner they deserved. 

Town have been poor in recent weeks, so it beggars belief that we decided to show almost no ambition going forward once we had our goal. Prior to Ward’s clinical finish the game was open but Town were playing the better football and looked decent. After we scored, everything froze up and nobody seemed interested in getting forward very much. Some teams are superb at getting their noses in front and killing off games but Town, at the moment, don’t have the character or confidence for this kind of approach. 

After the game Carlos said we didn’t attack enough in the second half and that’s why we didn’t win. I don’t know if this was an admission of his own excessive caution or a confession that he can’t influence the players on the pitch and it was the players that decided to be so cautious. Neither of these options reflects well on Corberán and I worry about where our season is going. 

Stale tactics and selections 

Early in the season we stumbled into the 3-4-3 system and it helped keep things tight at the back, allowed Thomas to shine at wingback and gave us enough big players on the pitch to be lethal at set pieces. Now it looks overly negative, Thomas is badly out of form and the set piece goals have dried up (possibly due to a recent obsession with blasting the ball to the near post most of the time). 

Town haven’t scored two goals in a game for around a hundred years now and create very few chances in most games. Adjusting the tactics or changing the personnel on the pitch seem to be the obvious ways to make us more of a threat going forward but we see the same pool of players used for almost every game. 

Mipo and Aarons might be rubbish but no fans can say that for sure because neither have been given much of a chance yet this season. The same can be said for Jon Russell, who was promoted from the B Team to cover Hogg and Vallejo but instead High is played in a position he’s not suited to and we continue to look lightweight in midfield. 

Carlos’ faith in his core group of players and 3-4-3 formation may pay dividends in the long run but at the moment it feels like we’ve been found out by other Championship teams and the players that did well early on this season are collectively off the boil. 

A little bit of ambition could go a long way this season 

Based on the teams I’ve seen Town face so far, this season’s Championship is one of the weakest there have been in many years. Outside of Bournemouth and Fulham there are few teams with genuine quality. Town certainly don’t have much quality but have still been able to pick up some decent results up until recently. 

If Town had a bit more ambition and one or two more decent players then this season could be very different. I think avoiding the relegation scrap and finishing in midtable obscurity is the best we can hope for but it could so easilybe better than that. 

We’re currently only five points from the playoffs and with the January window approaching it could have been a cause for optimism. However, the situation with Phil Hodgkinson means it’s incredibly unlikely we’ll see the kind of season defining signing that a more solvent owner might be willing to finance under the circumstances. 

If Town had a player with the ability to control the tempo of a game from the middle of the park in the way Mooy did in our promotion season then it’s possible we could be a genuinely decent team in this league. But that’s not likely to happen and therefore we’ll continue to struggle to properly control games. 

Is it a blip, a slump or a crisis? 

From the outside I can imagine other football fans would think that it’s a bit daft to be booing the team off and calling for the manager’s head when we were widely tipped for relegation and currently sit comfortably midtable. 

The worry is more about our performances than our results. The football is tedious and unambitious now and it mostly was even when we were picking up wins early in the season. The lack of creativity and sparsity of goals in open play are both long term problems that have got worse rather than better. 

I genuinely don’t know whether this recent run of poor results is a short term blip or a symptom of a long term rot but I’m concerned. The fact we’re repeating the same mistakes over and over is a worry. On the other hand, if we win two games in a row then everything will suddenly feel fine again.

Throwing away leads isn’t our biggest problem

Recently, Town have dropped many points from winning positions and I thought we must be among the worst in the league for this habit but the stats didn’t back up this instinct. The Transfermarkt website has a table of points earned after taking the lead in games and it shows Town have taken the lead in 13 games from which we’ve won eight, drawn three and lost two. This isn’t an amazing record but it’s far from the worst when compared to other Championship teams. For example, Derby have taken the lead in 12 of their games and only won five of them. 

The area where Town really stand out is when you look at how often Town have taken points when they’ve fallen behind in games. We’ve fallen behind in games on nine occasions and in those games we’ve lost eight and drawn one. Most Town fans would have known this instinctively without looking up the numbers as it always feels like you might as well go home once Town go behind as we so rarely claw our way back into games. 

This disparity between points dropped after taking the lead compared to points gained when falling behind suggests there’s a problem with the character of this current crop of Town players. They’re too nervous when they get their noses in front (as we saw on Saturday) but they fall to pieces when the other teams takes the lead. 

I think part of our current malaise is down to missing the organisational and leadership skills of Hogg in the middle of the field but it doesn’t say much about the rest of the squad that one player getting injured turns the team into a quivering mess. 

Having a viable Plan B may also be a factor in our inability to fight back in games. Too often we plug away at the same system regardless of whether we’re behind or ahead, too often hoping patient build up play will pay off. I don’t like route one football all of the time but sticking on a big lad and putting it in the mixer is a football cliché because it works often enough for most clubs to resort to it when you’re chasing a game and time is running out. Too often we lose games with a whimper rather than battling to get something, like we saw Coventry do against Town at the weekend.

It’s not time to sack Calros but boardroom strife means it won’t happen anyway 

Despite grumbling at length in this article, I don’t think it’s time to sack Carlos, like many fans were suggesting after Saturday’s game. While he’s not a footballing messiah and clearly has made plenty of mistakes in his time as head coach so far, he’s also not doing too badly with a squad that few other coaches would be able to get more from. 

The thing I’m disappointed with about Carlos is his failure to deliver the attacking, relentless kind of football he helped coach while he was at Leeds. The dream we were sold when he first arrived was that he could take average players and get them playing beautiful football but after last season’s capitulation we’ve seen a lurch towards pragmatic and often dull football that often grinds out positive results but rarely sets pulses racing. 

I’m not going to lie and say Corberán is doing a fantastic job but his record so far this season means he’s earned the right to keep plugging away at whatever he’s doing. It may be that he has a long term vision that will see a return to attacking football once he’s able to get the right players in the squad. 

Regardless of Carlos’ performance, I really can’t see anyone sacking him anyway. Who would make the call? Surely not Phil Hodgkinson, who it sounds like is chairman in name only while he attends to his crumbling businesses. I also can’t see Hoyle being in a rush to change things as he’ll most likely have to pay compensation out of his own pocket to the current coaching team. 

If the rumours are to be believed, we may see a new owner come in soon and they may have different ideas about what Town should be doing. If so then Carlos may find he needs to show a bit more nous to keep hold of his job. Few chairman would have been as patient as Phil was during Town’s horrible second half to last season. If our current struggles continue for long and a new owner comes in then I can easily imagine Carlos quickly coming under pressure, particularly if fans continue to boo the players and coaches off the field at the end of games.