I don''t think our squad depth last year was that bad. We had Moses and Marin to come on. It's a shame that Marin got injured (and lost form) and Moses was used well by Benitez i thought.
We had like 75 games to play last year, so we dropped quite a few points because of our intensive fixture list. Remember, we lost 1-0 to QPR at home (stupid result) and shouldn've beaten them away when we had a clear penalty turned down. Then there were the Liverpol fixtures which we should've won at least one of. The 1-1 draw at the Bridge should have been a victory but we were so wasteful after going 1-0 up. Torres, Oscar, Mata all had chances to finish them off. Even the Anfield game we should've seen out, but we conceded with like 30 seconds to go. To be fair at Anfield, Liverpool probably would've felt hard done by if they lost that. When we drew with Tottenham 2-2 we had the same problem in terms of not putting the game to bed. Tottenham weren't really in it until they scored and even when we made it 2-1, we had chances to send them packing. So I think this problem of not being able to kill teams off comes from last year too.