Newcastle / Home / Preview: Balancing expectations of success against perceptions of achievement
If I had written this piece in the 87th minute on Saturday, it would have had a very different tone.
The last-minute goals were joyous and quite frankly a huge relief after a month of poor performances and results. The 90 minutes epitomised our 34 games so far; a great start, frustrating moments, a slight recovery, a mini-collapse and then glimpses of quality to rescue the points.
At times, our season has tempered expectations. The loss at Brentford was a low, but the win at the weekend - and the nature of it - was emphatic. The juxtaposition between the 6-match winning run, and then winless runs (with a 7-0 loss in the mix) has brought some grumblings about inconsistency and discussion over how we could have approached the season better.
We often hear of the glass ceiling: the divide between the expectation of success and the general perception of overachieving. This season has emphasised the fine balance between our ambition and the realism of the challenges posed in the Premier League. The leaps and bounds we’ve made over the last couple of years have heightened expectations and rightly increased the thirst amongst our fanbase for a return to European football and the possibility of winning our first domestic trophy.
This year has been labelled as ‘transitional’ by the club’s mouthpieces as well as some fans who perhaps are unwilling to admit that we have not performed to the levels that were expected at the start of the season. The club invested hundreds of millions in new players, and we haven’t seen the immediate results of this. Nevertheless, there have been moments of quality and glimpses of potential with European football on the horizon again. If you had offered Tony Bloom the opportunity to be in and amongst the race with four games to go, then I’m sure he’d have snapped your hand off.
It’s tricky to maintain the balance as a fanbase between being aspirational and aligning with the club's mantra that we’re in a process that takes time and won’t always be linear. We sit in quite a unique bubble that when we are winning, we tend to get love from the media: Brighton are this model club who are overachieving, and everyone is very pleased for us. When things aren’t so great, it is ‘to be expected’ and there’s very little focus on both the players and the manager. This lack of critical exposure is rare in the Premier League and sometimes makes our frustrations as fans seem disproportionate to other fanbases.
The approach to this season was significantly different from previous years. The summer transfer window saw a change in how we attacked the market, or as Paul Barber likes to say, ‘the pond that we fish from’. Instead of losing players, we saw a significant increase in investment: the players brought in were not three million pound signings from South America, but players worth ten times that amount, signed from major European clubs and leagues.
There was a slightly disjointed pattern to some of the recruitment. Brajan Gruda, for example, was a regular starter for Mainz, who sit in 6th in the Bundesliga. He wasn’t an unknown gem but a prodigy who deserves and needs first-team football to grow and develop. At the moment, we cannot offer him that because his route into the side is usually blocked by Rutter and Pedro. Adding to this, we have an abundance of left-side forwards who would rather play in the middle (including Buonanotte and Enciso who will return from their loan spells) that would probably offer more output than him now. This begs the question as to what the plan is for these players; are they happy with sitting on the fringe and waiting for an opportunity, or are the club investing in a stockpile of talent to make a profit from?
Significant amounts of the success we’ve had is derived from investing in young talents and patiently waiting for them to flourish in the first team, so perhaps we should have more patience?
We have undoubted talent up front, and the luxury of options off the bench to change the way we play. When we played with pace and directness, the goals flowed and take the strain away from the defensive frailties.
The fact we added to the biggest collection of left sided attackers in the league seems even more strange as we didn’t also recruit an experienced left sided defender. We’ve been too easy to exploit throughout the season and haven’t been able to create a solid core or foundation for which we can build defensive stability. You’d have to assume that the number one priority this summer is securing someone to fill this gap in the squad.
Verbruggen’s patchy form hasn’t particularly helped, but he’s young and learning. Van Hecke has been brilliant over the last two years but is still growing into his role. Hinshelwood has had to spend spells of the season at right back, his talent is clear to see but he is still developing.
The pattern here is inexperience, which is fine when balanced with professionalism and leadership. However, at times this year, the vulnerabilities have been easily exposed. We have the second-youngest side in the league and undoubtedly, there are going to be mistakes and learning curves as players develop, but it will take patience (which fans including myself don’t always have!).
The interesting route we took was spending £300 million in an attempt to take the step towards establishing ourselves as regular European contenders, but we coupled a young squad with Fabian Hurzerler who is very inexperienced compared to the managers he’s competing against.
It begs the question whether the two are a match or whether they will cancel each other out. Personally, I feel the appointment was the wrong one for where we are in our project, however Hurzeler will get time, and I hope he can prove me wrong and deliver success.
When we’ve struggled, it hasn’t been a down to ability as we’ve got that in abundance, but instead mentality and desire. The clubs that we are going to be competing with going forward for those fringe European places (Newcastle, Forest and Aston Villa) all have managers, leaders, and fan bases that demand the most from their players week in, and week out. If we are going to compete against them then our club and fanbase needs to adopt an attitude that brings fight and determination to win every week and move away from the mindset that we should be glad to be where we are.
If we want to take the next step, we need to be ambitious and ruthless and have hunger both on and off the pitch. We will need it against Newcastle at the weekend, as without sounding too cliché, we head into four massive games to close the season.