A Losing Mentality

I don't know about you but I knew we were going to lose on Saturday. In fact I was so confident, that I had already written Plymouth's Preview with that in mind.

And if the fans expect to lose against a team with only 2 away goals all season and that has never won at the Valley, it would be surprising if the players thought otherwise and clearly after reading the blogs yesterday it appears they expected it as well. It all put me in mind of something I read recently, someone, referring to a sportsmans mind, saying that you either have a winning mentality or a losing one and quite clearly we as a team have a losing one.

So can anything be done? Well, sadly or not, while luckier (?) people than me were at the Valley on Saturday I was in front of the TV watching Spurs being outplayed by a stylish Liverpool. One nil to the away side and it was only a matter of time before the second and third when in. The bar was hit, the post was hit but it stayed at 1-0. Harry wasn't doing much but his team, although outplayed, were. They kept running and chasing and one guy up front - you know who I mean - never stopped believing that he was going to make a difference. A lucky break with an og which had been won from a corner after Darren had chased a ball running out of play, but you could see, although bottom of the table, Spurs didn't have a losing mentality. Someone had installed in them a fighting spirit.

Two weeks ago, it was a joke to be a Spurs fan but it isn't now and the only plus I can see from the state we are in is that there's not 2 weeks left till the end of the season, there's about 24. So time is on our hands and if we could look back and see the fizzy table one year ago after 15 games the three teams in the relegation places were Norwich bottom, Palarse above them and then QPR. All survived the drop.

Norwich had sacked their manager of one year, Peter Grant, just one month before and after Glenn Roeder took over would sink lower in the table before finally finishing in 17th. At Palarse Peter Taylor had been also sacked on 8th October after just 10 points in 10 games and Warnock, of course, took over and they finished 5th.

As for QPR, John Gregory had been sacked on October 1st after a 5-1 defeat by West Brom had left them at the bottom of the table and after Luigi De Canio took over they finally ended up 14th.

So all three changed their manager and survived. And I can't take my mind away from Darren Bent chasing till he dropped on Saturday battling back from defeat to table-topping unbeaten Liverpool. Such belief we need to find from somewhere and the only person who can provide it is the manager.

And one final thought. Four months ago I asked a mate, a Hull fan, what it takes to win promotion from the fizzies. He gave three reasons, after seeing us only once, the most surprising of which bearing in mind the performance 2 days ago, was that they had a team who wanted to play for their manager and as a further comment, he thought that our problem was that we didn't. Enough said really..