Last day Blues…

By: David | May 12th, 2008

Ewood

Birmingham 4-1 Blackburn

I wrote most of this post, then my PC froze, and I’ve lost it all, so I won’t say much.

The scoreline flattered Birmingham, but you get the impression that the team didn’t particularly want to go to Lithuania sometime in July. Fair-play if I’m honest. The Intertoto is not just tiresome for players, but supporters too. Have fun Villa!

There was a good article at goal.com (I would provide a link if I could) which theorised that one of the reasons the top 4 are dominating is that ambition from the rest of the clubs is lacking. It suggested that teams like ourselves and Everton (who have been solidly top-half for the past few seasons) neeed to look at getting into the top 4 spaces and being more confident about our ambitions.

However, it’s hard to balance ambition and realism. Man City and Newcastle have shown that ambition needs to be matched with stability and acceptance of failure, without the knee-jerk reactions that have seen countless good coaches not given a fair deal.

However I think that we have a sensible enough board and a good enough base to see Sparky making some confident comments over the summer talking about top-5, maybe top-4 finishes. Yes, we may have it in the back of our minds that such a thing may not be possible, but it would be good if such ideas could get into the player’s minds so they could step up a level.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” I think this quote is relevant to all mid-table Prem teams. I’d like to think that we are one of the “some” that Oscar Wilde describes.

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In a few weeks I hope to take a look at our main rivals challenging for Europe and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses compared to ours. This will hopefully keep the blog going during the Euro’s (which I cannot wait for), though I will also be doing exams during this period, so hopefully Jim will keep things rolling if I can’t produce any posts.

Also, please get commenting if you are a regular reader, and if you enjoy what’s going on here, please link this blog.