There were plenty of positives, but the catastrophe of this season meant we could not build on them.
You should care what Liverpool fans say....because some of you are starting to sound like them (and Wenger), crying and shifting the goal posts to make coming 5th sound like some kind of trophy.
"We didnt have Modric and VDV so 5th is better than 4th.....City were better....we dont have as much money so in our world EL > CL"
If the record points tally is so important answer me this: Had we achieved 74pts in, say 2001, would last season still be a success to you?
It would depend on what had occured between then and now.
What I've done is chart the ENIC seasons. What we obviously know is that our more successful managers peaked in their first full seasons.
As we've been there-or-thereabouts for 5 seasons or so, the general feeling is that we've been going somewhere, but last season was clearly an improvement on the previous 2 for points.
What we shouldn't forget is that Harry had a cracking first full season in charge. CL for the first time, beating City on the last day, it was end to end excitement.
What's important to not forget, however, is that in the next two seasons we didn't actually progress. The season we qualified for the CL, we also got to the SF of the FA Cup (shit Portsmouth game) and the QF of the league cup - everything we want these days in cup runs and fourth. The next one we had a lower points tally, 5th in the league and we were ejected from the domestic cups pretty much straight away. The QF of the Champs League masked over most of that.
The next season (Harry's 4th season) we threw the Europa and League Cup away at the first hurdle, got to the SF of the FA Cup (humiliated by Chelsea), threw away our fantastic start to the season, just scraped fourth and yet still didn't get CL.
I'm not comparing last season to 2009-10 when we got CL and had great cup runs, I'm comparing it to 2011-12 where the league cup and Europa performances were worse, and we could say that we didn't qualify for CL because everyone else did great. That year, it was because every woolwich and chelsea fan's dream came true.
CL Season is the orange box...
I'm sorry, but I don't look back on 2011-12 with good memories. For me, we threw everything away all season..
"Oh look we're 10 pts clear in 3rd" Fucked it
"Oh look we're in the semi of the Fa cup" Fucked it
"Oh look we finally managed to scrape the CL places" Fucked it
I'd rather look back on last season and think that it was the season we had on of the best players to play for us in amazing form, we showed we could survive without Modric, and we fought like men in the league despite having shit tactics.