I agree. Like I posted earlier in the thread, our expected position should be 15th based on xG expectations. That’s pretty bad. We can bury our head in the sands and say we’re 6th, but that would be poor development and learning.
Thing is that we all know we are not normally a bottom half side with ten hag. We've been horrible this season and are lucky to be 6th based on performances, and have played like a bottom half side, but there is no reason to expect us to continue playing like a bottom half side. It's just burying your head in the sand to pretend like it's been fine and not that bad.
My issue with ten hag, the way we play and things going forward is I don't think ten hag has it in him to be anything more than a top 4 competitor. The system has been horrible and while he will almost certainly adjust things (because anyone with half a brain cell will know that conceding 20 shots per game is not ok), I don't see anything to suggest he can bring us to Liverpool/Arsenal/city level. And that's what we need. We need that level of clear coaching impact. It takes time to get there, inconsistency is fine. But when you play like shit every game and start bigging up a small winning run where you didn't actually have a competent performance even once, that's when I'm going to argue it.
Once in a while we should be controlling, dominating, limiting opposition chances, and creating enough. That's not expecting a finished team, that's just expecting to occasionally have your coach actually make an impact and not make every game end to end, decided by individuals. Even Ole did that. You don't need to play super fluid football to look like a competent side. You just need to tick the basics once in a while.
People trying to pretend that stats like a bottom half xG against is not a problem is dumb. A good team just won't have that. People trying to pretend like 20 shots against per game doesn't matter is really dumb, as anybody will tell you they'd rather not concede 20 shots per game and that being 17th in the league in conceding shots is a horrendous stat. Having a while +1 goal differential at this point is horrible. It is very easy to look deeper than "6th place" (which is still shit for what it's worth), and see all the other stats that point to us performing at a horrible level. And then people will say "oh we've been better since Christmas"... Marginally yes. But in those 7 games of 5 wins, 1 draw and 1 loss, we've gained 13 xG and conceded about 11 xG, and our underlying stats put us at about 7th for this hot run. So yes, we have played a bit better since players returned from injury. But the games are still end to end and the metrics say that during this run we have been fortunate to get 5 wins, and it'll drop down. It's not sustainable performances where you are controlling every game and you can say we've turned a corner and we are deserving of this run.