All I hear is doom and gloom

Ten to three in the morning.

I should be sleeping.

I'm not.

I'm blogging.

Because it might not seem so bad in the cold light of day.

But it is bad.

It's very bad indeed.

We've just lost to what us old skool would refer to as a Fourth Division team. A team from the bottom tear of English football. Not even one of the better ones. An average one.

It's not as if Bradford had got this far by turning teams over. They hadn't. They haven't actually won a League Cup tie all season (until now). A string of draws followed by getting lucky in the shoot-outs is what propelled them to the semi-finals.

We can't say we were robbed. Yes, Benteke might have scored a couple on another day and Bent missed a couple of sitters but then Bradford had loads of squandered chances too and hit the crossbar. It could have been better but it could have been much worse.

Defensive naivety? Well that excuse will only take you so far, but are they learning no lessons from crushing defeat after crushing defeat? Is no work being done on the training ground? Are they not putting extra hours in to sort out what has leapt from embarrassment to abject humiliation?

Even if they are not good enough, they should at least be better than this.

It also seems that the ineptitude is catching. Even Lowton is starting to look like a bumbling incompetent whereas he was starting to look the business before the bad run started. Clark, Baker and most worryingly the Lambert-signed Bennett all look at times as though the basic fundamentals of defensive play are beyond them, while Bannan and Delph showed once again that they are ineffective against grown men. How many more chances are they going to get?

Oddly Charles N'Zogbia put a decent shift in, though this may be because he saw a semi-final as a shop window to get another lucrative move, while Andi Weimann always looked a threat, but with an inept midfield and a defence that can't get the basics right, we'll be doomed no matter what level the opposition are from.

We can get through the second leg, but if all it leads to is another humiliation at the hands of Chelsea in the Capital, do we really want to?

At the moment, I'm more concerned about the imminent visit of Southampton.

Looking forward to it?

I'm not.

Oh, and we're out of the FA Youth Cup too and at the first hurdle. Bright future and all that...