Nordic Saint

Poor Turkish's obsession with me is bizarre because I'm really nothing special. He's followed me around on football messageboards like a pet dog for nearly ten years. But, with his boasting about what designer labels he has in his wardrobe and how he looks in the gym, I can't help thinking he'd be better off posting on Mumsnet.

I think if you took an average of the managers and players posters on here think we should have signed over the last two years and compared it to who the 'professionals' at our club actually signed, we'd come out ahead of them. Since Paul Mitchell left, our recruitment all seems to be just smoke and mirrors, Vestergaard 'a big bloke' at centre half who isn't very good at football, being a classic example. Would any of us have chosen him? I think not. We all knew he was too slow. It was no secret.

Javier Calleja was my long-term choice when we sacked Pellegrino, a young up and coming manager. Paul Cook was my short-term fix: a motivator to keep us up. Who knows how they'd have turned out? Choosing the right manager is certainly not an easy task but I think that our previous head of recruitment, Paul Mitchell, had it as close to an exact science as you could get and that he probably deserves more credit for the Pochettino appointment than Cortese who went along with him to see an Espanyol game, where he claims he noticed him, gets. The one thing most of us agree on, however, is that appointing the usual suspects, Pardew, Hughes, Bruce and Allardyce, reeks of setting your stall out to finish 17th.

Gazzaniga suffered from the coaching of Dave Watson. I always thought he would do better if he could get away from him. Forster's career has been wrecked by Watson. It will be interesting to see what he does to McCarthy and Gunn, who, at the moment, seem OK. The best scenario would be that Watson has learned from his mistakes and doesn't repeat them.

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.