Home form

Danny has an important post on how our home form isn't quite as good as people think. It's an idea I'd been playing around with for a while. Because for the last few months I've grown into the opinion that we're much better suited to play away than at home. I thought that this suggestion wouldn't really match up with the data, but Danny's post showed me that our home form isn't quite all that. And a brief look over our fixtures from the last two months works for my thesis.

Our last ten league games have neatly divided between five home and five away. And while we've taken seven points from those home games - beating Birmingham and Wigan, drawing with Liverpool, we've taken eleven on the road - winning at Turf Moor, Craven Cottage and Stamford Bridge, while drawing at Stoke. Now, I appreciate that this is a small data set, and is fairly skewed by the fact that we played host to better teams than we visited. But my whole point here is about recent form and our recent shape. You can only go to war with the data set you've got.

And why this disparity? I think it's a natural consequence of how we're set up. It's all very well saying that we play an attacking 4-4-2 but the fact is that most of those forwards are best equipped at running into space in behind, rather than somehow breaking through the Fort Knox style defences we increasingly see at Eastlands. This means that we're effective on the break - remember our two wins in SW6 - but sometimes we struggle at home. Remember our Wigan and Birmingham home wins: we scored eight goals in those two games but both times we looked rather flat before our breakthrough, which was aided by combinations of defensive error and referreeing generosity. Once we're ahead we're good but I don't think it's too hard for teams to come to Eastlands and shut us down.

I'd put this down to two factors. One is the absence of an in-form Stephen Ireland, who has a final ball that isn't too far away from being of Ali Benarbia/Eyal Berkovic quality. He can unpick the parked bus, to wilfully mix metaphors. The other might just be the famous outside-in wingers we now play with. It's easier to constrict the space inside the full-back than outside, which means that teams defend narrowly in the knowledge that Adam Johnson and Craig Bellamy will be cutting inside towards more bodies. If we played our 'goold old fashioned wingers' Martin Petrov and Shaun Wright-Phillips, and if we had full-backs who were any good going forward (Garrido and Zabaleta are too slow, Richards and Bridge can't cross) then we wouldn't have this problem.