The9

He set up a couple of decent chances when we were on top, and he was still trying to close people down along with Davis when others weren't quite so keen. Reed is also definitely NOT a better player at the moment.

I have to say, having watched the goals back from the first half, that the Sturridge goal with Can's outside of the boot pass would have been avoided if Clasie hadn't been done by Can's heel chop but more importantly that Wanyama hadn't ambled back, not even tracking his man, for a good 10 seconds after the ball broke from Van Dijk's header near the half way line, and in doing so left 20 yards of space in midfield for Can to run into before he made the pass. I'd go with Clasie and Romeu, only because Romeu might want to prove he should start more often, and Villa are bad enough that we don't need 2 DMs against them, and we could always bring Wanyama on if we get a couple up and need to lock the game down. We should roll over Villa even with Caulker in for Fonte and a couple of them need some game time.

Clearly SOMEONE on Twitter doesn't know what #TBT is.

All fair points IMO, apart from "giving up", I didn't see any of that and saw pretty much all of them haring about the place in the last 10 minutes - possibly more so than mid-half, which might have been part of the problem. For once I was stone cold sober at a match and won't be second-guessing anything until I see the footage again.

I don't think he's conceded any "slightly soft" goals. The point is that if you let strikers have time and space you have to be lucky as well as good.

Point of order, he's 18th out of 32 keepers, as opposed to the 18th of 20 that people might assume. Also joint 7th in "wins", fwiw.

Around me in Block 41 there were a lot of part-timers in the seats of ST holders where people couldn't make it, most of whom left when the 4th or 5th went in - but the atmosphere was pretty good until the 3rd, and picked up loads for the last 15 minutes with the Northam doing the high tempo clapping version of OWTS and after the final whistle. Before that you could tell there were more kids at the back of the Northam as every slow OWTS degenerated at the end of the first verse not the second, and people were all over the place with it. Though by the end the regulars were board-banging in time to keep the song going. Overall I thought the support was better than for most home games this season, which is saying something given the score - though there is a bit of that "may as well make noise" thing when teams are getting humped.

That's her prerogative, but the fact she upset the kid more than the singing did suggests her priorities are not with his general wellbeing as much as her desire to appear offended.

There wouldn't, because most teams don't allow that kind of space and time around the box.

But they're still better than the smattering of U21s we frequently had on the bench last season.

The problem with 4-4-2 is that 4-2-3-1 beats it all ends up - the 4 at the back cover the 2 up top just as they always have and if anything it's easier because CBs always have a man to mark, and the 4-4-2 midfield is overrun by the extra man in 4-2-3-1. The one up top in 4-2-3-1 isn't an issue because there is always at least one of the 3 AMs supporting - in fact 4-2-3-1 is basically just a 4-4-2 with split midfield to have permanent DMs and a slightly regressed support striker. The front 2 were used without Pelle against MK - which doesn't really tell us much due to the level of the opposition, but I agree mixing that up could be beneficial on occasion - predictability is the enemy of creativity.

Try some comparisons between last season's (or the season before's) benches and this. Also, don't forget all the "why don't we pick Reed?" stuff is irrelevant, because he's a constant in both.

Most of them are alternatives to give options for different systems or styles of play and that's how they make an impact. By definition the subs are not believed to be as suitable as those starting. We don't have the money to have game-changers who aren't as good as their equivalents on the bench. Juanmi may become that player, Gaston was that player in theory, Long often has an impact - the point is if any of them were able to do their thing more effectively than the starters, they'd be starters - and for every highly paid sub we have to give us that "impact", there's a trade-off in having a weaker option elsewhere. It's about balance when you can't spend the money the likes of Man City can.

Maybe we've got cover not competition but that's still way better than any second choice team we've been able to field... probably ever. If the first XI were unavailable at any Prem club they'd expect a significant drop off in form from their first team, the point is that you'd probably only expect at worst 4 of them to play in the first team at any one time. Coincidentally 4 of them were on the pitch last night by the end.

Our strength in depth is about trying to have players who can step in without there being a big drop off in quality, not about having excellent players who can change a game who aren't already playing - we don't have enough money for those. To save people the trouble, no it didn't look like that with Caulker last night, so I guess the challenge now is to try and either get the squad players up to speed so they CAN step in (like Romeu/JWP/Long/Rodriguez have done) without an obvious drop off, or to find a way to (afford to) buy better players and make the current starters the squad players.

1) I should have gone to Stereophonics.

This is reasonable (not much of it here today).

Quite. You give Prem strikers the amount of space and time we did around the box last night and if they put it where they want to no-one's stopping it. Even the one which went under him was first time from 6 yards out, he had no chance. FWIW he also didn't need to save Can's late effort which was going wide. Thought he was pretty good on Saturday too, took some balls to grab the one with the two City forwards sliding in, and did well to block the initial effort in those conditions and then grab the rebound just in time. He had one slightly wonky kick yesterday but mostly his kicking was excellent - especially given the number of times we rolled it to him under pressure in the second half. If he was getting a hand to things and not stopping them I think I'd be a lot more critical than I am of him not getting to things smashed past him, and I'm fairly sure he couldn't be expected to get to that one Lallana corner which bounced on the opposite touchline.

There was a muted chorus of "ohhh Gaston Ramirez" just after the final subs were made last night. I thought that was weird even knowing it was his birthday. Best present he could get was not having to play in that result.

Agreed. In terms of "lack of movement" generally, I think it's as much about moving the ball quickly and not letting defenders get their shape as it is movement for the sake of it. We play down the wings a lot and so get a lot of crosses in, but they're a low percentage pass generally, so we have a lot of attacks which don't end in a chance being created. That's not got much to do with movement unless there's no-one in the box at all, but the success of the cross will have a lot to do with how organised the defence is, which comes from whether they're already in the area facing up the pitch or if they're running towards their own goal trying to track a runner - it's far preferable to play the ball early if there's the opportunity just because the defence isn't set and is more likely to make poor decisions or mistakes. Same goes for through-balls from the hole, and of course transitions and broken play too. So I'd say it's as much about moving the ball quickly (which is one of Steven Davis' main strengths) than it is moving the players. Anything which causes unpredictability and uncertainty in the defence provides an opportunity to create a goalscoring chance.

The heat map showed he was mobile across the entire final third. He's also regularly in midfield linking play - when asked to. Hardly any lone striker would defend from the front, that's completely pointless even at County level as players just pass to the unmarked man and it's a complete waste of energy - so that's a tactical decision. We've already shared the stats about him winning a high percentage of headers compared to other strikers, and the bit about "just standing there" is so obviously not true, AND contradicts the heat map, it doesn't even make any sense. I'd also add that if we're planning on going long directly to his head which we do occasionally, "just standing there" is exactly what he's meant to be doing so the person passing to him knows where he is. However when we choose to go long to his feet you generally find he's just dropped 10 yards off the CB to collect the ball. In summary, he runs plenty, he moves plenty, and when he's not moving it's because the tactics dictate he's not meant to be doing so.

I think he's shown he has a good range of forward passing, he's still getting used to the pace of the Premier League and whilst he is better in terms of creativity, he doesn't offer the defensive cover you get from Romeu.

You can say it as many times as you like, it's still not true.

The biggest concern I had last night was the big empty hole where our defensive midfield was meant to be in a midfield 5 during the second half. I thought we were pretty decent in the first half - aside from the lack of resistance to the goals (which I accept is a fundamental flaw no matter what they're doing the rest of the time). For a team whose success was built on defensive solidity, we seem very keen to move away from it by experimenting with something other than Wanyama/Romeu. I have some reservations that we are defensively strong enough against top 6 (maybe even top half) sides without that "back 6" concept - even though Romeu isn't a patch on Schneiderlin he is close defensively without offering such rapid and accurate passing to the forward positions - whilst Clasie and Ward-Prowse seem to offer the passing without the defending. As a result of not having a player of the quality of Schneiderlin doing both, Koeman has to make a judgement on the balance of the side in advance of every match, but recently he seems to be just hoping Clasie will work.

The point is we only allowed them space and time in the second half because for some reason Koeman decided our best chance to get 2 goals back was changing the formation entirely so no-one knew what they were meant to be doing. In the first half their goals came from picking off our worst defender having moved the ball into space more quickly than we could have closed it down, nothing to do with "allowing" it, we were playing well but they targeted our weakness and managed to get good scoring chances. The second half was different, Wanyama to CB was terrible in execution and we played most of the half without any defensive midfield, with predictable results. It was a tactical gamble to try and load the midfield to stop the quick pass forward from their midfield from happening, and it both didn't work and weakened us as well - they had all the space they needed in the whole where Wanyama wasn't and once they'd got the ball past our front however many it was by that time, there was all the space in the world in front of the back 3 to attack us, which led directly to the 4th goal (and the ones after it).