Nordic Saint

He's better than anyone else we've got and our results when he plays are better than when he doesn't. Of course, he's not as good as Fonte and van Dijk but those days are gone. If Hughes sticks with Yoshida and Bednarek v Chelsea, we could get a draw; if he plays Vestergaard and Hoedt, we'll lose easily.

Let's hope Hughes doesn't bring Ward-Prowse on as sub and hand the game to Everton.

He's slow and unathletic. He'll never make the grade in the Premier League. Thank God he's not playing tonight. Yoshida and Bednarek are much better than Vestergaard and Hoedt.

He doesn't have the quickness of feet you need for the Premier League. No amount of coaching from our brilliant first team coaches is going to change that. Another 20 million + wasted because, like Carrillo, he is simply too slow for the PL. That was known before we bought him, which is a shocking indictment of our current recruitment team.

Fonte's Lille team beat Marseille 3-0 to go 2nd in Ligue 1.

If the inane drivel you post on here is anything to go by, that would have been a good result for you when you were at school.

Darren Moore as manager with Paul Mitchell as DOF would be good. But, until Les Reed can be persuaded to retire, it's very unlikely we'll get anyone good. Also as West Brom and RB Leipzig are flying high and it's rumoured Man Utd want Mitchell, they probably wouldn't want to come here now anyway. Lethargy and laziness seem to have permeated our club from top to bottom. We really need someone dynamic and ambitious at the helm to inject some energy and enthusiasm into it.

If we'd played Yoshida and Bednarek instead of Vestergaard and Hoedt, we just might have got a point today. If we persist with our current centre back pairing, we will be relegated. Unfortunately, it's going to take Hughes a long time to figure that out by himself. Let's hope when he finally does, it's not too late to save us from the drop.

We've turned into the new Stoke: no fighting spirit, shambolic defence with 2 big, useless lumps in the middle of it, with our ambition largely limited to trying scrape home draws and keep the score down to less than 4 in away games.

It hasn't. They have a better manager and players than we've got and have done well in the transfer market, bringing in Fabianski, Felipe Anderson and Yarmolenko in the summer. We have nobody as good as Arnautovic, who cost about the same as we paid for Carrillo.

"expect them to troop off the pitch reasonably satisfied with a 2-0 or 3-1 defeat" Pundits seem to think that we have incredibly low expectations nowadays.

You mean Old Les and Kat took orders from certain players? I very much doubt it. The board, led by Les and Ralph. in consultation with Kat, decided to sack Puel. Those who still credit Les and Kat with everything good that ever happened at the club, but nothing bad, will of course try to deflect the blame onto everyone else, including the players and fans.

I'd do what Cortese did: meticulously analyse how other clubs have achieved success recently. He and his team went round Europe doing that before putting together their action plan together here. In England, Wolves is one I'd take a close look at. They have recruited from Portugal, which arguably has the best value league to buy from at the moment, and I notice that Forest have started to copy them. Building a relationship with one of the top agents in Europe is another thing that's helped them. I've also been impressed by what Wigan have achieved in the last couple of years. They have some good players, like Nick Powell, we should consider buying. But, Cortese analysed a lot of clubs, not just one or two, although what he saw at Barcelona heavily influenced his plans for our Academy.

But could he manage a small club like Leganés to beat Barcelona like the great Pellegrino? Seriously though, Puel wasn't sacked because of any pressure from fans. Although there was a lot of criticism online during the season, there were no protests at games and by May most fans thought he'd done enough to deserve to start the next season still as our manager. The decision to sack him would have been made by the board in consultation with the owner. So, it was Les and Kat who wanted to get rid of him, and neither of them has ever done anything because of what fans posted online. Personally, I think he deserved longer than he got here. He was an average manager but most of us knew that it was unlikely our board would replace him with anyone better.

Pellegrino dropping Carrillo did the trick, giving Leganes a comfortable victory over Barcelona. He's obviously a managerial genius. The downside is that we're going to be stuck with Carrillo again at the end of the season beacause I can't see anyone else agreeing to take him if even Pellegrino doesn't want him any more.

Yes, excellent post from Turkish.

He's a bit of a waste of space, quite honestly, and so shouldn't really be in the team in any position. He's not even the great dead ball specialist everybody keeps saying he is. Whenever we get a free-kick in a scoring position just outside the opposition penalty area, he wastes it by kicking it a yard high and wide of the goal.

If Hughes drops Hoedt, Vestergaard and Long and replaces them with Yoshida, Bednarek and Ings, we could possibly get a draw at Wolves. I don't know why posters on here keep putting Vestergaard in their best starting XI, as he is as much of a problem as Hoedt. The pair of them look like worse versions of Hooiveld.

At the time of the sale wasn't it reported in the Echo that there would be no changes to the board for the next three years? So, presumably that was a clause written into the contract Gao had to agree to.

Yes, he seemed to regard a 0-3 defeat as something of a victory. He was obviously expecting worse as in his last two seasons there his Stoke team were on the receiving end of some real drubbings: 0-4, 2-4, 0-5 v Chelsea, 1-4, 2-7 v Man City, 0-4, 1-5 v Spurs, 1-4 v Liverpool & 1-4 v Arsenal.

The change in the quality of our recruitment would largely be down to the change in our Head of Recruitment. Ross Wilson got by in his first few months here as we bought players his predecessor Mitchell had already identified, particularly van Dijk, whom we'd been linked with before Mitchell went to Spurs. but since then we have seen that Wilson is simply not up to the job, our transfer budget has been woefully wasted and the quality of our squad has badly deteriorated. The key figures who were responsible for our success: Cortese, Mitchell, Pochettino, Koeman, Fonte. They've all gone now.

His Lille team are 2nd in the French League with only PSG ahead of them now. What a fantastic end to his career it will be if he adds a French League winner's medal to his European Championship winner's medal and goes on to play in the Champions League. He was an absolute legend for us and the best captain and leader our team has had this century. He deserves this success.

Yes, the eight points we got from our relatively easy first five games last season cushioned the blow of the later defeats by the big six and were what ultimately kept us up.

Just as long as he's not stupid enough to have three goalkeepers as first team coaches.

I see Paul Cook's win percentage at Wigan is now up to nearly 60%.Thank God he left Pompey after getting them promoted as at the rate he's going he'd have got them into the Champions' League. Couldn't we get him as our manager as well as some of his best players, like Nick Powell?