S-Clarke

Yeah Trafford is very much the Bazunu of this season, how Man City got around 40m combined for Gunn, Trafford and Bazunu is insane. We've been bitten twice by them. They'll all have decent careers without doubt, but they were blooded in the top league too soon. I'm all for signing a young keeper as backup to an experienced lad but it's hard to justify spending £15m on a backup keeper, so he kind of has to play by default.

Absolutley that. That back 4 is my starting back 4 and it shouldn't change again. Maybe Stephens can come on in games where we need him, but there's no need to mess around with that 4 from the start if they are fit (well, 5 if you class Downes as the deepest CM). The back 4 are going to be slightly rocked with a slight change in the way they play without Bazunu to use as an out ball, so playing the guys who have already established relationships makes the most sense to me.

Hard to really gauge much conclusiveness on the GK situation from tonight, although we didn't use him as much as we used Gav - that's one takeaway I saw. PNE were utterly awful though, as bad as Blackburn and Swansea. They just stood off us and let us play and move around them, they played like training cones in that first half it was embarrassingly easy.

I wasn't saying that, I just said how we'd adjusted to play with a different type of GK. I think we'll miss what he gives us with the ball playing and giving us an extra man in midfield at times. It's hard to really come to any conclusion that we're a better team until his replacement has been put under any sort of pressure. I'm not alone in being disappointed with the goals he lets in and how limp wristed he can be, but the comments and celebrations about him getting a long term serious injury are absolutley classless and the sort of thing you get from anonymous trolls on twitter, not fans of a football club.

To take it away from some of the classless comments on this thread, I thought it was notable how the team slightly adjusted their approach at the back tonight. We obviously appreciate that McCarthy isn't as good with his feet (no one can deny that Bazunu is top draw with that element), so I noticed much less tight passing around the back. Hard to say conclusively though as PNE didn't press us a great deal and we weren't put under much pressure, but it did look as if we moved the ball away from the back 4 much quicker - and McCarthy wasn't as advanced as Bazunu often is from his penalty box.

We were shit hot in that first half, we tore them to pieces. PNE did make it easy for us as they seemed to stand and watch us a lot, rather than engage in that first half - made it really easy for us to do those quick 1 2's as they simply weren't tracking. But we were totally on it, sharp and quick - unlucky not to have a couple more goals. I thought the team looked so balanced, we attacked down the left or the right and had players crossing on their natural sides - it made such a difference to the speed of our attack and how often we were able to get into advanced positions without having to turn back. The second half was as I expected it to be, a bit of a training ground effort really. PNE came out to play for a bit of pride, so they got tighter, we slowed down and just played out the 45 mins really. Not much to say about that second half as it was just a training kick about - players should still be pretty fresh after that! My overall takeaway from that game is how balanced we looked, Manning made a huge difference - when he doesn't have to defend he's a really good outlet. It makes such a difference having players on their natural sides as you reduce the need to cut back, or turn back to get it on your favoured foot - so the pace is kept up and the forward movement is retained. MOTM for Che well deserved, unlucky not to get 3. He's hit form at exactly the right time. Special mention to Brooks and Armstrong as well, I thought their movement and the way they were coming inside was causing PNE so many problems - the cute pass for Che's second goal was PL class from Brooks. So, that's 1 down! Hasn't changed anything in terms of the outlook though, we still need to win all our remaining games and cannot drop a point. Let's get it a good go.

It's absolutley fine having an opinion on one of our players and how they need to improve, but some of the comments on the last page cannot be from Southampton fans as they're a disgrace.

The 'young player' stuff being thrown around doesn't really float for me. At 21 in football terms he's not really young, plenty of players aged 20-21 have played and are playing to a high level. Tino, Lavia, Shaw, Bale, Theo, Ox, Palmer, Bellingham to name just a few. Even Edozie has given us more than Mara and he's the same age. He's not had an enormous amount of minutes, granted - so that is an argument to have for sure, but my assumption on that is that he's simply not showing enough to be considered good enough to play. He may make a career for himself but I don't see it being at a high level, he could end up going to a lower French side I reckon. Sometimes it just becomes obvious that a certain player is simply not going to make the grade.

Rotherham was a funny one, we've certainly had some frustrating games this year where we have been shit (Blackburn away, Millwall at home etc), but that Rotherham one in my memory was a total freak of a game. Play that another 9 times we win it 9 times. That game was just one of those games that everyone gets. The game that killed us this season was the Hull home game, totally knocked us off course as we then went and lost again against Millwall. Those are the 2 I will always look back on as the games which consigned us to the playoffs.

I get really nervous when we bring him on in a game that's still on the edge, as when we're up against it he's a non-entity. His showing against Cov was one of the worst I've seen, and I've seen Charlie Austin. If he ran around, made his presence felt, tracked, then we could forgive him for his many technical shortcomings - but when he doesn't do any of the 'basics' it's hard to be too downhearted that he'll be missing.

When you look at the options we have in attack, it's pretty frightening really. He's going to have to manage this lot right. Palmer, Kane, Foden, Watkins, Saka - someone is going to have to miss out! Rice and Bellingham should be the two in CM. It's at the back we have problems, the drop off in quality is stark.

Yeah I'd expect Dibling, SAA etc to step up - maybe Larios and Meghoma as well. The problem is we don't have those good youngsters to step in to fill Armstrongs boots, or Adams boots, or THB etc. The returning loans are an interesting proposition, but wages will dictate those I think. ABK has apparently already told us he'd only come back if we were promoted, so he can do one as far as I'm concernered. If we don't go up this year we will have a serious job on our hands to build a competitive squad in the summer. Should make the rumour mills fun at least, and this thread should be mega active.

100%, It's not like we're asking him to pull off worldies like that in every game - far from it, just a few a season would be nice, I'd like to see him do something that at least earns us some points - otherwise we might as well stick an outfield player in goal, could potentially be the ultimate Stephens shoe-horn position.

We would certainly have to replace the loans, but we'd have much more to do this summer should we fail. KWP, Bednarek, Adams, Armstrong (x2), McCarthy, Sulemana would all need replacing in some form as well, as there's no chance we'd retain any of those guys. We'd need at least 12 players to replace all those we'd lose (including the loans), but we'd probably need more than that in order to have a squad. Will be a tough ask without a DoF to boot! It's a bit daunting really, we'd have more of an upheaval than last summer, but we'd have less money, no DoF and no 'just relegated' advantage over the rest of the league.

Just for comparison, we are ahead on points from where we were after 41 games in 2011/12. Not by many, just a couple - we had 79 points after 41 games back then. We did manage to snatch 2nd on only 88 points though, no one got over 90 pts that year. So I reckon we can bet on us beating our 2011/12 points total for sure, but the others are all going to be in the 90's as well. Looking at the games remaining for everyone I think a fair guess is that 95/96 points will get you into the Top 2 places, anything less than that and it's playoffs. For us to get 95/96 points we need to win every game, just shows how impossible it really is. Even a single draw will stop us hitting those point tallies.