Nordic Saint

He seems to be MOTM in every one of Boro's games nowadays. Maybe we need to reassess him. I must admit I never rated him when he was with us, but now he looks like someone we really need right now: an attacking midfielder who creates and scores goals consistently. http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/middlesbrough-fc-man-match-vs-11265929

http://www.theguardian.com/football/video/2016/apr/29/mauricio-pochettino-extends-tottenham-contract-to-2021-video Some stability would be good. It can be done.

A season in the Championship? Nobody at the club would be stupid enough to bring Pardew back even though he'll be available in the next few months after Palace sack him.

Our most important players are always the ones there will be transfer speculation about, as they are the ones other clubs want to buy. It's not their fault that they are good players. It doesn't make them any less loyal than the players other clubs don't want so it's unfair of some of our fans to turn against them before they've even been sold.

Townsend would probably be the most useful of the 3 but on their current form, Mane,Tadic and Long are ahead of all of them.

Excellent point. He is obviously a lot more useful than Oxlade-Chamberlain. W really don't need another attacking player with a double-barrelled name, who almost never scores. We've already got Ward-Prowse. Let's hang onto the better players we've already got, who do score goals: Tadic and Mane.

It's just an objective and very comprehensive statistical analysis of their passing, not an opinion. It includes every aspect: percentage completion, assists, key passes, length of passes, crosses, through balls etc. And, Clasie, surprisingly, comes out as a significantly worse passer than Wanyama and Romeu. Fans tend to watch players subjectively. They have their favourites and their scapegoats, sometimes based on things like physical appearance, media reports of what they've said etc. The statistical analysis is a bit more objective.

Romeu. At least he can tackle and do some defensive work. Contrary to the myth, passing stats for Wanyama, Romeu and Clasie actually show that Wanyama (rating 6.98) is the best passer and Clasie (6.70) is the worst. I think some people notice Clasie's passing more because it's all he does, whereas Wanyama and Romeu do a lot of tackling and intercepting as well during a game. Fans of Clasie say he makes telling passes, but that appears to be a myth too as I can't recall him having a single assist all season. Complete analysis here: www.whoscored.com/Players/90802/Show/Jordy-Clasie www.whoscored.com/Players/71714

Jos, N0. 26, in familiar pose last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXlIMLM1nRM

I think some fans don't realize how difficult it must have been for a defender to play alongside those three and still look good. Clyne and Fonte were just 2 patches in a leaky sieve. You could put the best 2 defenders in the world alongside Hooiveld, Fox and Davis, and you'd still have a terrible defence.

It certainly showed when Fonte was out for the league cup match v Liverpool. Imagine half a season like that.

Steckelenburg (since his shoulder injuries. Yes, I know he USED TO BE good, long before he got injured and came to us), Targett (he even looks a defensive liability in the U21s), Caulker (washed up because of his heavy drinking and other issues), Martina (he's just not a defender), Ward-Prowse (Very overrated. He's a waste of space in most games), Yoshida (might just scrape into one of the bottom 3 teams but he's basically an average Championship level defender).

If you count Mane as a striker, and I do, then the only one of our midfielders any other team in the top half of Premier League would want in their first XI is Wanyama. One or two of the others might be of interest to one of the newly promoted sides, but that's about it.

That is an excellent point, SaintTex. Half of that team are barely Championship standard, let alone European class. It would be great if we didn't plug gaps with cheap options like Steckelenburg, Martina, Targett and Caulker, next season. Playing such poor players in so many games not only saw us fail to make the Europa League group stage but also cost us a top 5 finish this season.

So 8th place it is then. We really should have beaten Everton. Let's not slip up against Villa and Palace, the 2 worst teams in the league on current form.

We wish. Probably the best young striker in Europe on current form. I expect he's already out of our price range and will go to a bigger club for a huge fee.

After all the years he's been with us, he gets taken a bit for granted. But, we'd probably miss him more than any other player, as we did this season in that 6-1 league cup defeat to Liverpool. Even Lovren used to get most of the credit for our strong central defence. Then it was Alderweireld and now it's van Dijk. But, nearly every time one of them had to play without Fonte alongside him, we shipped loads of goals.

Yes, what a fantastic buy Kirchhoff has been for Sunderland, and he's still only 25. He's definitely one of the best defensive midfielders I've seen at St Mary's this season, and would be the obvious replacement for Wanyama if he left. But, if Sunderland stay up, they won't need to sell him.

He's not in the same class as Pelle and certainly no upgrade on him. He's scored just 1 goal in 8 games for Scotland. There are lots of strikers younger and better than Martin we could buy, like Borja Baston and Vincent Janssen.

Kieran Trippier but Paul Mitchell took him to Spurs.

We lost Paul 'black box' Mitchell to Tottenham. Luckily for us, he identified Van Dijk as a key target before he left.

True, Sour Mash. I think this has been a great season in the Premier League, but the refereeing has been very inconsistent, and that has been the one sour note.

Great post. Totally agree with everything in it. The quality of the Premier League is very good. English clubs are through to the semi-finals of both European competitions. There were plenty of journeymen in the Liverpool sides which won the league nearly every year in the 70s and 80s who were nowhere near as good as the likes of Schmeichel, Mahrez and Kante. What p!sses the naysayers off even more is the fact that there are so many great English players coming through like Kane, Vardy and Alli. For the first time in decades, England could actually win a major competition.

Everton seemed to set out in the first half to injure as many of our players as possible. Fonte and Wanyama were subjected to some nasty fouls. I've noticed it's a tactic of dirty teams to target key players early in the game when there is less chance the ref will give them cards.

Yes, it would have been better if he'd subbed Clasie instead of Wanyama. I thought Wanyama was outstanding yet again today. He's another player, like Tadic and Mane, some Saints fans seem reluctant to give credit to.