Highbury Hillbilly wrote:No such thing as luck at this level. Salah might be firing but £64m Nunez is not. They have cover though thanks to Jota and Gakpo. If we signed proper cover, we'd have been OK too.
We were 8 points ahead of everybody in 22/23 up to the final 6 weeks of the season, and that was helped by making 3 signings in Jan....
I agree we should have addressed our attacking options, but when you say 'signed proper cover', we did that, for example, with our defence, signing Calafiore. Yet, despite that, we lost White for months, Tomiyasu nearly all season, Saliba a few games, Gabriel a few games, Zinchenko and Tierney for months, not to mention Calafiore for a significant number of games, as well as losing our new midfielder, again signed for cover, with 1 training session under his belt. That is bad luck.
Go back to 1999, and watch Bergkamp's penalty. It goes in, the Treble is gone. It didn't, but even then it took Bayern to collapse when literally a few minutes from victory. As for Liverpool's plastic treble in 2001, when Henchoz is allowed to play volleyball in the area, then you can't overcome that sort of karma.
I do wholeheartedly agree though, that we should have done better with attacking cover. Luck still plays a part though.