Captain Kolo: We can’t be happy with a draw
Kolo Toure spoke today about our four successive draws, stating it’s not good enough. With the talent available we should be doing better, and ‘top four’ teams wouldn’t be happy with our recent results.
“There are some gifted players in this dressing room, we can enjoy our football by passing it and controlling games.
“City is not the team it was before, a lot of things have changed and our mentality has to change as well. We can’t be happy with a draw or drawing four games in a row. Chelsea, Arsenal or Liverpool would never be happy with that, which is why they have been at the top, so neither can we.
“When you are 2-0 up, you can’t let teams come back, that was a big mistake by us. Against Birmingham, we did not play in our style, we played the way they wanted us to play and that made it difficult for us. It was the same against Wigan, we did not really play our game.”
I think this is exactly right, and it’s precisely what we should expect from a player who is used to winning game after game, as Toure did at Arsenal.
Saying a point at Wigan is an improvement on last year, or the game at Birmingham is the kind we used to lose isn’t good enough. The publicly stated target for this season may be top six, but there’s little doubt that players like Toure, Adebayor, Tevez and Barry came here with much higher targets – and not in a few years time.
The only thing I’d question is where Kolo talks about us failing to ‘play our game’ against Wigan. Despite a decent points tally, it’s still not clear exactly what ‘our game’ is. Apart from Scunthorpe, and possibly West Ham, it’s hard to think of a game thus far which we have controlled throughout. Even in our victories, Blackburn, Wolves, Pompey and Arsenal all had decent chances to salvage a draw.
At least the captain is speaking up, and hopefully performances and results will pick up.