verlaine1979

Couldn't care less about relationship with fans or local businesses. Focus on running a professional and successful football club without mortgaging its future to unsustainable debt. Everything else barely qualifies as a nice-to-have.

Superb vision from Gaston.

Absolutely dire attacking performance. Witless.

The nutjob stream is actually an embedded frame of cdn.tiv.pw/stream3.html - if you view that, it's just a plain page with the flash video - no ads or anything else as far as I can tell.

Blimey, not even an illicit radio stream.

Couldn't get the ball off hazard all game, then same story once the Oscar and willian came on. Of course that's 130m of attacking talent mentioned in the previous sentence.

Lallana is good, but he isn't anywhere near the level of Reus, who is one of the world's top ten attackers. Moyes needs to make a statement of intent with a world class acquisition - Lallana isn't that.

Club surely bluffing on subject of whether we'll recruit anyone in Jan. Performance from 2nd string pretty much shambolic.

To be fair, I was in the process of writing a very whiney post, but that was superb.

Well done JRod - great decision-making and composed finish.

Haven't laid a glove on them so far. JWP pass-back our only effort on target.

Err, well at least we have a few genuine attacking options on the bench?

Tiote was excellent against Man U.

Exactly. Oh for another Brett Ormerod.

I'm afraid I have to disagree on this occasion. Although the stats state we had 9 shots on target, we didn't force Guzan into enough saves for a team that had 77% of the ball. JRod had two decent headed chances, both of which were from quite hopeful looping crosses, and Lallana had one deflected onto the bar, but aside from that we had nowhere near the attacking authority such dominance of possession should entail. Give any of the top 6 close-on 80% of the ball at home, and they are going to put 5 or 6 past you with ease.

We don't really have anyone who passes with genuine authority (with the possible exception of Lambert). When most of our players want to play a high-precision ball they have to take a lot of pace off it to get any sort of accuracy. JWP seems the most likely to be capable of it, but for obvious reasons lacks a bit of confidence for now.

Shaw's crossing isn't exactly Bale-esque, is it?

Wasn't mentioned in the OS article about injuries...

The most reliable way to create chances (other than the largely discredited pacey-winger-slinging-it-into-the-box method) is by engineering numerical advantage in key areas of the pitch. You can either achieve that by the opposition being tactically inept, or because your players have sufficient pace or technique to go round an opponent, taking them out of the game. However, to do that you have to be prepared to risk possession of the ball, which is something I don't see us doing much at the moment. We pass very well, but we generally choose very high percentage passes, and in midfield you very rarely see anyone try to commit an opponent before offloading the ball.

Same time last season West Brom were 3rd with 26 points and managed to finish 8th, so I'm not really sure why we got all the media attention we did (presumably because our flirtation with the top three was based on a core of English players rather than an exceptional loan) - still, recent results do suggest that while we're a strong side, the most likely outcome is a similar finish to that achieved by WB & Swansea last season.

I agree - Wanyama and Schneiderlin provide a very solid platform, but unless we are comfortably on top they don't advance much beyond half-way.

Feels very similar to last week, where we have to play at 100% to have a chance of containing a top team playing at about 60-70%. Not really surprising considering the vast difference in squad cost and depth, but a pretty fair marker of our level.

The three players I mentioned are substantially faster than Lallana and Wanyama, and while JRod is probably about as quick, the fact that they can all pass/finish while running at pace gives them quite a significant edge over him. Sure, we can debate PACE if you like, but I'm not sure capitalisation makes much of a difference to the matter at hand. Saints have one genuinely quick player in Clyne, and a couple who have reasonable acceleration in Shaw, JRod and a few others. Pace in transition, and pace to exploit the space created when one of our more technical players beats a man is definitely something we lack in comparison to, say, Arsenal, who in the first 30 minutes last week pretty much shredded us through a combination of superior technique and superior speed.

Arsenal have pace throughout their team - maybe not flat-out sprinters when Walcott is injured, but Wilshire, Ozil & Ramsey all have decent pace with the ball at their feet - probably a good 20-25% more pace than our equivalent players do, which was one of the major differences during the first half on Saturday.

Looking at one of his Blackburn compilation videos, probably half of his goals come from him picking up the ball outside or on the edge of the box. He's also two-footed by the looks of things. No idea if he's actually good enough to cut it, but I don't think he's just a poacher on that evidence.