Virgin Media ruined my season!

Ok so that's not strictly true, but since when has the truth got in
the way of any self-respecting FML manager explaining their reasons
for losing ;)

My Internet has been down for 3 days so I hadn't been able to log in
until I made it to Starbucks this afternoon and managed to spin out a
large Americano for 90 mins or so whilst I caught up! When I logged
on, I found that all the top sides in the division had finished their
seasons and that we were sitting 6th, 12 points behind the leaders
with 4 games to go. With our GD 4 wins would probably have made us
champions, but two horrific defending mistakes against the 3rd place
side later and it was all over. Two tame draws followed and now with 1
game to go we're guaranteed a 4th place finish.

If you'd offered me 4th at the start of the season I'd have bitten
your hand off - higher qualifiers for the second season, a rep boost
and just shy of £2m in the bank is fantastic news! But given that I
topped the division for a time at the weekend and was still in with a
shout of the title today I ended up feeling quite disappointed. I
guess the best analogy is perhaps Liverpool fans in the 2008-09
season: a good finish (certainly compared to this season ;) but a
feeling it could have been so much more.

Setting aside Virgin Media, it's clear that my main problem has really
been spells of bad form at crucial times. 6 games without a win last
week knocked us right backwards just when we looked like mounting a
serious assault on the top spot, and bottling it today stopping us
breaking in to the top 3. Jakswan wrote a very interesting post on
form last week (not sure how to post a link as I'm on my iPhone but
there should be one on the bar to your right) in which he essentially
argued form is cyclical because as the team wins more and more games
they become more and more confident in a virtuos cycle until they get
over-confident and lose a few, then they start to panic and lose some
more in a vicious cycle until they grind out a win and start the
virtuous cycle again.

So perhaps the key is to focus on grinding out a win - any kind of win
- when things are going badly. In this scenario defensive tactics and
low creative freedom to cut out silly mistakes would be the order of
the day. And then as things start to improve gradually allow your team
to express themselves more and play more attacking football. I don't
know if that will work, but it's a theory I intend to try out if I run
into bad form again next season.

In the meantime, i'm going to stick to blaming my ISP... I don't think
even Sir Alex Ferguson has come up with that one before ;)