I'd like to be able to write that I believed we had a chance tomorrow but sadly, tomorrow is one of those matches where I don't think we've got much of a chance.
Sure, Manchester City will come at us and we do do better against the top sides because we can counter attack. We sit back with as many men as possible and hope for a lucky break and sometimes it does work.
But it's not the right way and it's why the top teams actually do what they do as you tend to score more goals and win more games and that is why they are top teams. And the manager wont want to admit to it but it is what happens.
And opposition managers know this. They know what to expect and how to play against us and you could argue that it's the quality of player and you'd not be wrong, but why make all the changes in the summer if we weren't going to strengthen.
The match
Manchester City will know before kick off if they've got a chance of going top or not by winning to they'll know they have to win to not lose momentum. Basically Manchester City will want to win this match and they'll come to do exactly that.
We, as already written above, will sit back and wait for a chance. We wont really take the game to them until they start to slow the game down for whatever reason they want to slow the game down for and it appears for a few minutes that we've got control and actually, it will just be Manchester City taking it easy.
And I'm not complaining or suggesting that it's wrong. I think it is fair to say now that the changes in the summer haven't worked out as well as we would have hoped as quickly as we would have hoped.
Basically we didn't start this season as we finished the last. The main hope now is that this season doesn't take as long as last season to get going. And if it doesn't, that will be what we base our blind optimistic hope on next season and the season after so that hopefully one day we're playing good football all the time. talk about grasping at straws, I'm getting proper desperate.
Live tomorrow and news
Anyway, Manchester City tomorrow and about an hour before kick off we'll have the team for you and a new post with banter all day and we might even throw in the odd YouTube link to a film that puts a smile on your face.
And although I'd really like to talk about Westwood and his injury or the comments made by Paul Lambert about long ball football I don't have the time today to actually look at the stats, like he suggests and show him that we do play an awful lot of long balls and the percentage that actually get to one of our players isn't very high.
And you can call them long passes if you want but the simple truth is when you play a ball long you are giving the opposition an opportunity to compose themselves and be more prepared for it. It's in essence creating a 50/50 ball and it is long ball football and it's no coincidence that other managers and football fans in general think that about us.
But, towards the end of last year, our long ball football was replaced by more passing and more composure and hopefully, that will come back and I fully expect it to.