The9

When are we playing QPR ?

Arf.

The closest thing we've had to a "kit changing every three years" was the shorts and socks from the home kit not changing for the last (Theo/nose-breaker) Friends Provident shirt and the first two season (Bale/Playoffs) flybe shirt with the black stripe down the sleeves. That was one of the nice, fan-friendly touches we used to get that you can forget all about now. The other Prem shirts ranged from 1-2 years, and in the early 2000s we'd established the decent trend of have a 2 year home, with the away and third changing in the alternate year. It meant the club got a decent income every season but there was a nice balance with feeling obliged to fork out for it - which of course I did anyway. Meanwhile, Spurs have changed all of their kits every season since (approx) 1998, and managed to have 6 outfield shirts including different Euro sponsors last season.

Pure speculation here, but I THINK Patrick were owned by JJB - they certainly had Wigan's kit when Dave Whelan still owned JJB and basically only retailed through JJB Kitwear. As JJB are now (mostly) owned by SportsDirect following their recent administration / collapse, I suspect there may not currently be a Patrick brand to be branding kits with.

I'd love to see how they stretch their limited template range to produce something unique for us, Stoke AND Sunderland... one white with red, one red with white, ummmm...

I think they've taken the existing contracts and removed the ones which are expiring or being bought out. Forest and Blackburn have "proper" contracts with Umbro similar to ours (and get their own unique tweaks to the standard kit templates as a result), but Huddersfield's "Umbro" deal is actually a deal with a Yorkshire-based kit supplier, not Umbro itself, so they may not have any Umbro kit to supply them with. For some reason I can see us ending up with Macron or for the lolz, Warrior. No idea what we're getting at this stage though.

Our Umbro contract runs out this season so we'd have been getting a new kit no matter what. Nike have bought the valuable contracts (Man City and England) and will take those over, ours is expiring so we could end up with anyone (apart from Umbro, who basically don't exist any more). Plus even if we were still under Umbro contract it was for two one year shirts a season anyway.

Not sure why the OP thinks that this (dubious) stat, which has already been discussed to death in the various kit threads anyway, is the reason we're playing in red. All I heard was something along the lines of "everyone's got a striped shirt and are more likely to buy something else". Which of course is the justification for changing the away kit all the time, not the home kit.

I don't even think they can and that's why they've gone with "number of matches attended" - it's ridiculous, there's a summary of all of your match purchases on your account, all they need is a field to report loyalty points per transaction which refers to a lookup table of "points per match" for the same match, and then you'd at least have the number of points for all of the matches you had paid for and could add them up yourself even if they couldn't get the system to do it. Though come to think of it, as ST sales are a single purchase on the account sales history and the points get added on a match by match basis, they'd have to factor that in somehow for ST holders too... It doesn't really matter until we start getting into "Wigan's meant to be worth the same as Man U AND Man C combined but now it's only worth the same as one or the other...".

To be honest the away ticketing was always going to be massively biased in favour of those who went to Man City away as they were bound to get priority for Arsenal away as well. That's basically the reason our group made bloody sure we went to both of those. The lack of a "totaliser" for points online (especially with the matches listed on your account, is it SO hard to allocate the points and display them there ?) is an hilarious oversight, only compounded by the difficulty of tracking down how many points matches are actually worth. To actually work it out for yourself you need the following information : > The original "Loyalty Points" post on the OS > The original match ticket pricing post on the OS (to work out which matches are in each category) > The individual points totals for the Sheff Wednesday and Leeds League Cup matches from the Ticketing details for those matches on the OS (Stevenage wasn't counted). That's actually three separate OS posts too. > In case you think that's easy, also be aware that somewhere out there is the OS post where they tell you that the Man City tickets are worth more loyalty points than the category they're in. So as long as someone can track down those 5 pieces of information, and collate them to the matches they've attended, then they have a chance of knowing how many points they have. Fortunately the OS is also unable to keep track, and has settled on a "number of matches attended" total, which makes it all completely irrelevant.

I wholeheartedly agree with this post. Especially the bit where it implies people who boo Guly are thick fookers.

Billy Sharp's got a bit of a hammering for not being good enough for the Prem in a few places, ironically enough yesterday I'm pretty sure someone was saying we should have kept Harding on the same thread.

I'm going to need a source for that possession stat... all the stats I've seen have had our completions high and our possession relatively high - compared to our League position, anyway. Transitions of play are the key to a lot of goals, players can be out of position, teams might have far more players forward than usual (eg Lambert's header v Man U came from Schneiderlin intercepting and Lambert already being in the box for the cross instead of outside the box setting up the crosser, and there were sufficient bodies forward to work the ball to Puncheon quickly without it being the obvious option and easy to defend). As you've said, we tend to sell ourselves quickly, and this happens more often at transitions - Podolski's "free run" for goal 1 at Arsenal being the prime example. We're not great at jockeying, pressing or making things more difficult for the opposition when we lose the ball, basically. Presumably you're talking about compactness front to back (thus providing more pressure on the ball in a congested midfield) rather than width, because sometimes it's our compactness in terms of width that creates the space out wide for the opposition to exploit, repeatedly. One area where I can't figure out the coaching is the reluctance of the full back to move outside the sides of the penalty area, especially quickly enough to to close down a player who has the ball out wide - we were allowing all the space in the world wide of the box in pre-season, and against Wigan, and those areas were exploited again by Everton and Fulham.

Sorry, you're just outright wrong on this one, the "at least three" occasions when Lallana left Fox exposed is accurate. Fox was left covering two wide men twice leading to goals alone. Lallana was "trying to get back" but that's not a lot of use from 20 yards away as the two opponents pass between each other. I don't actually blame him for it, but it illustrates the problems we have in that our midfield is too attacking, and we don't have either the fitness to play 90 minutes in the Prem or the quality to bring on from the bench. I don't think Lallana should be captain simply because he's not been a "leader" in terms of being vociferous when he wasn't captain. Everyone should be leading by example, but captains are about vocalising it.

Hah, when I had my knee ligaments ruined by a knee-high two-footed scissor tackle from behind, the bloke didn't even get booked and I literally crawl-dragged myself off the pitch on my hands and, er, knee before hopping to the changing rooms and going to town to get drunk and numb the pain.

Sorry lloydie but the use of "chat sh1111t" completely undermines any point you may have had, you chav.

But the misuse of "hear hear" is definitely down to spelling.

If you ignore Kick Off 2 from 1990 or Sensible World of Soccer, to name but 2...! I used to love World League Soccer 98 on the Playstation, the nearly-right names, proper kits, different formations, solid commentary, weather effects, realistic ball movement, decent keepers and deflections (plus the ability to get a player to keel over from a deflection in the nuts) made it best football game I'd ever played until ISS Pro Evolution Soccer came out - not harmed by Ray Wilkins doing all of his commentary in one sitting, describing the "petulism" of players when he meant "petulance" and referring to "Goal Mouse Inthidents".

"Glenville Adam James le Fondre".

Fewer matches in the Prem.

Let's not go nuts.

We're around where I expected us to be regarding performances, but that's left us behind where I'd expect us to be in points terms - I think 7-9 points would be a middling expectation from the matches we've had so far.

Let's try considering a minor change to the focus of Davis / Schneiderlin / Ward-Prowse / Cork as the likely solution rather than shunting someone blatantly out of position, especially one who managed to entirely lose the ability to pass just by moving 10 yards to the right on the pitch.

Not so much a front sweeper as a "defensive midfielder"... I'm looking at one of our existing midfielders playing more defensively rather than a defender needing to be regularly involved in the creative passing. As I mentioned previously, we're using possession as a defensive tool by starving the opposition of the ability to threaten us, but we need to be able to do that AND prevent the opposition from opening us up easily as soon as we turn it over - ideally what's required is a player with the ability to hold and shield the back line AND who is capable of passing the ball well to retain possession. I think we've already got a few candidates in the midfield, it just needs to be a change of mentality in there - and a measure of how much removing that additional offensively-minded central midfield player will impact our ability to create chances at the other end. I don't think the defence is at fault as much as some people think (brain farts like deflecting the ball into your own net when under no pressure three times aside), any defence at any level will struggle to contain a team if there's no shield in front of them - pressurising the ball by coming out from a back 4 naturally opens up spaces immediately in front of goal, and by then it's too late.

Difficult to say isn't it ? We didn't buy Hooper in the summer either despite spending £7-8m on another striker so clearly having it.