Slaven Bilic is looking on the bright side of life and declares: “We can be confident now.”
The boss appears to have recovered quickly from the Spurs defeat and like most fans was very happy with what he saw for long periods.
Speaking to the official site in his ‘Manager on Monday’ column he said: “I would rather play the way we did on Saturday than go there and say after the game ‘okay, no complaints, they were much better’.
“Playing like that, it’s only a matter of time before the luck or more concentration will come on our side.
“We can take a lot of positives from the game, and make no mistake we will, but the three points were there for us.
“They were dangerous, but we were dangerous also, so we can be confident now.”
However, he is deeply concerned that cut out the costly indiciual errors which, of course, brought the injury time penalty.
He said: “If you make those mistakes you are not guaranteed to win your game, even when you are at the top of your game.
“There is a quality opponent there [to take advantage], but those mistakes should not have happened. That’s football and we have done it.
“It wasn’t done through complacency. Sometimes you can get away with a few mistakes, but you can’t make them against Spurs.
“The penalty was a very good move from Son – I also thought he was going to cross the ball, so he slides to stop the cross. It was his quality to do what he did and wait for the contact.”
I am not sure how many relegated managers have trotted out that line, stop playing Antonio at right back, stop playing Zaza. win a few games ugly or grind out some points, the team has to be one unit in defence and attack if the forwards and I do also mean Antonio and Payet here are not helping out the defence then we will struggle not to concede goals, last season we played as a team this season we have at best 9 players operating as a team and two defensively that don’t track back in Antonio and Payet whatever arguments they might make that suggest they are ore useful in the opponents half the evidence is that we are 17th in the table and we don’t defend well enough out wide on left or right but particularly right. Last season seeing Antonio help out his right back (before he was played as a wing back) was a feature and Dimi also used to come a lot deeper to help Cresswell out, when they did we looked solid, we are also missing Alex Song who did a lot to shield the back four and our downturn in results last season can be linked to his falling out with Bilic and disappearance from the team.