The9

Since the last season of the adidas kit deal (technically the one year deal after the original 3 year deal was cancelled by Cortese after 1 season) the club hasn't had sponsorship on the academy or development shirts - I'm guessing the Checkatrade Trophy U21 kits are different because it's a bit of a grey area about whether it counts as a first team fixture (not for us but yes for the opposition usually) and there's more chance of wider tv publicity.

All this "should have walked the group" stuff is ridiculous. We were third seed, at the time of the draw it was "obvious" that Inter and Sparta would be 2 of the top 3 with Saints battling it out with them. Didn't turn out like that, but our draw in Be'er Sheva was still an excellent result from a smart European away performance. More importantly, we were set out to waste as little effort as possible in going into the last game needing an attainable result. If Yoshida's header had gone in people would be marvelling at how we'd balanced the teams perfectly to get through with as little impact on the league as possible. 30 days, 9 matches, and we've still got 2 of them to go...

Nice catch - what with being in Milan and being rather drunk that had completely passed me by.

Boring as hell, but to be expected with the entirely necessary player rotation required to play 9 matches in 30 days without writing any of them off completely.

We've already gone further in both of the two Cup competitions we've played than we did last season. I'm happy to wait and see if our current 12th place League position is as good as it gets when we're not playing every 3-4 days or rotating players to try to minimise the effects of fatigue. I somehow doubt this is as good as we can be. My only concerns are replacing Fonte in case he goes in the Transfer Window, because I think we're likely to take any offer over £5m if we have a replacement lined up, and keeping hold of Van Dijk in the summer so we don't have to revamp the CB partnership again in the summer as that's part of the stable core we've built upon.

There was a HUGE gap between the back 4 and the rest of the team throughout the game, we always seemed to be tackling from behind with our central midfielders having headed clear to one of their players, and it was this gap that they scored from.

I've seen us score in Arnhem, and not score in Bucharest, Midtyjlland, Be'er Sheva, Milan and Prague... do Swansea and Cardiff count?

Yoshida went up top before Van Dijk did last night.

Actually yesterday, Inter away, and Leicester winning the Premier League all showed that luck very much has something to do with it, irrespective of our attempts to grow and improve, which I think we're successfully doing. There will come a time when our success from being competent is overtaken by everyone else finally getting on board with it though. Innovation soon becomes the norm.

Our business model is consistent growth. We've got further in Europe than last season and further in the League Cup than last season. That's going to have an effect on the league, but now we're out of the Europa League we'll see what happens when we're not playing more games. As for Katharina selling, we are excellently financially managed without it being at the expense of success, and there are very few clubs as well run as us. There are thousands of bloody awful money-waving idiots out there happy to completely balls up the same job if you want one of them. It's precisely why we've done well just by being organised and well run.

This is tangible nonsense. They play every game they play, and we're playing more games than usual so they're mostly playing as often as they would be in other seasons anyway. Do other teams' players lose form when we're playing on Thursday nights or playing extra League Cup games?

Why is this supposed to bother anyone? The issue for fans is whether we win games or not, right?

Because the modern 4-3-3 is a very similar formation to 4-4-2 diamond played apart from some nuances around the role of the point of the diamond/central striker, I should think. -----x----- x--x---x--x -----x----- x---------x -----x----- -x-------x- OR -----x----- x--x---x--x -----x----- --x-----x-- x----x----x

That's not a "long journey" you massive spoon. It's only 150 miles further than you can travel on the British mainland, and it was 1580 miles further to Be'er Sheva. I'm not debating that it was a load of guff though. The only time I think we underperformed in the Europa League this season. Everything else was tactical and related to the need to try and keep players fresh.

Leicester's biggest loss this season is the ridiculous levels of luck they had all season long last time out. They were never likely to have the same freak avoidance of injury and suspensions like they had last season, along with most of the top teams going through weird and uncharacteristic losses of form all at the same time. Kante is a significant loss, but in a normal season they'd have come 6th or 7th at best last year and that's only about a 7 or 8 point drop off to where they are at this stage of the season, which can easily be explained away by a few lucky bounces or injuries to starters here and there - plus they're playing Champions League games. As for failure of recruitment and minor miracle, no, we're doing just fine overall and anyone expecting there not to be a drop off in league position when we have 6 extra midweek games (plus the latter stages of the League Cup) is insane.

No, we were very good in Be'er Sheva and got exactly the result we wanted. No-one in the group got a better result than us out there. (EDIT: *this last sentence may not be true). We also had more chances than Inter. I'm not defending the utterly dire Prague performance though, a point there avoids most of the problems of last night.

Nothing the players have done since leaving has suggested selling Lambert, Chambers, Pelle wasn't the right decision. It'll be the same with Fonte if he goes.

Actually he did - by finishing us 6th last season.

He's (obviously) saying there's rotation between competitions, but not from game to game in the League. Whether he still thinks that's working, who knows? We're in a major cup semi-final for the first time since we got back to the Premier League, missed out on Europa qualification by one dodgy header over the course of 6 games, have the FA Cup to come, and to the shock of no-one, cup runs have affected our League form. We've also introduced or re-introduced McQueen, Sims and Reed to the first team. I think Puel's managed it as well as can be expected, by aiming to do the minimum possible to get us through - but when you operate on the margins, little things like one misplaced pass and a couple of teams scoring with their first shot on target, and Saints missing loads of chances in Milan, etc. leave you no room for manoeuvre.

By you changing your opinion, obviously.

Beer Sheva away, Hull away and Liverpool home were all good performances. Sparta away was by far the worst of all that lot... though I was quite drunk at Palace and missed the build up to their second so that might have been worse than I recall - but we mostly got done by two flukes there.

Thought he played well last night with the exception of his final ball, which was dismal. But you could say the same for Cedric and Bertrand's crossing.

Actually Puel has got this competition one Yoshida header a foot to the right away from absolutely right.

Went to all 6 games, the awaydays were fantastic, the matches... well, it's been controlled low-impact Saints - lets see what we're like only playing one match a week like most other teams. I think I'd have enjoyed it about 0.5% more if we'd actually scored away.

Annual Leave requests amended. I have Christmas and my Birthday week off now.