I know I bang on about it a lot, but this home v away thing is really intriguing me. Since we started playing in empty stadia, we’ve earned 20 points at the Vic and a mere 5 on the road (out of a possible 27). (We also drew and lost our two league cup matches away, but won both our home friendlies including one against a PL side). I’d have thought being the away side would have been slightly easier in these strange times, but not so for us. One decent away performance after Project Re-start last season and we’d probably have stayed up. A couple more decent ones this season so far and we’d probably be top, maybe even unbeaten still. Any theories as to why we are performing so poorly in general on the road, despite the lack of hostile home crowds?
It is mystifying- with no crowds shouldn't make any difference playing home and away Seems that coaches just set up teams as they have always done with the mentality to win your home games and draw your aways Very bizzare mentality
I have seen some comments from players and journalists at the games that the home team has kept the grass long to stop our passing game against a more direct approach from the home team. Also on at least one occasion the width of the pitch was much narrower than at the Vic so therefore the play was congested and made it more difficult to stretch the play and get down the wings easily.
Yes, it should certainly make less difference now playing home or away. During my years supporting us, we’ve had some fairly miserable long runs of rarely getting anything on the road, but really in these strange times it shouldn’t be like that. You only have to look at the PL this season to see an increase in wins by the away sides.
It's because we are complete **** when teams press us. Away they are doing that and for some odd reason at home they aren't pressing as much (historical home advantage I guess). If teams pressed us in every game we would have far fewer points as we have no idea how to play against it.
It is pretty bizarre and shows how much (a large part of) sport is all in the mind. Apart from slightly different grass and slightly different dimensions it’s exactly the same, home or away. It shouldn’t make any difference yet it clearly does, it must be ingrained in players and managers psyches to approach a game completely differently just because the pitch is located somewhere else.
I think if you look back at league tables from many, many years ago you find that the effect of home advantage was even greater. I think this was because the actual travelling was much more arduous, no overnight stays etc.
Our fancy pre madonna's like the Hertfordshire sun and the close family togetherness. Go away from that and it's more or less foreign to them. Step off the coach into this alien landscape. No wonder we lost at Barnsley, probably a few hundred coal mining cloggers on the way to the ground pulling weird faces.
It's the renowned fearsome "Vicarage Road roar" that terrorises the very heart and soul out of the opposition. It doesn't matter that they turn up and find the ground empty, the damage has already been done.
At other times though, albeit much less often, there have been seasons when our home form has been much worse than our away form, even in an absolute sense - 2007/08 was a prime example: https://www.footballsite.co.uk/Statistics/FullTables/2007-08ChampionshipFull.htm It seems to stem from the mentality of the players and the deficiencies of the set-up, as suggested in this post: Don't forget we had a good home record and a bad away one under Pearson long before lockdown. In fact, although the players seem generally more committed with a better team spirit, this season follows a strangely similar pattern to the one after the restart - a team that can hardly get a point away, and while picking up plenty of points at home is largely unconvincing and can often only really get going after we're a goal down and/or a sluggish first half (out of the 9 games we haven't lost, we've had to come from behind five times to win/draw - Leicester (h), Norwich (h), Newcastle (h), and this season Stoke (h) and Coventry (h)). Perhaps this is this underlying psychological problem that Ivic is trying to sort out?
This was also true for a couple of seasons in the early 90s. The club was being very poorly run and the atmosphere at home games was often one of protest, so the players seemed intimidated and unsupported. Away they relaxed more and got some decent results. I remember at that time the away fans were well behind the team, even though we knew they were not very good and we had some good away days as a result.
"Us at home vs US away". Interesting concept and I'm not sure how they will arrange this in practice. Must win game. Us at home 1 (Sarr) Us away 1 (Sarr)