verlaine1979

What's Welsh for "we're not still here"?

As soon as move breaks down, the midfield play the safe square ball every time, even when Foden is in space on the wing. They just don't trust themselves to play a pass that beats the defender. That mini break by Rashford just now was a great example - Rice could've easily bent a pass in to Foden, but chose just to lay it off to Henderson who then waited for Walker to catch up and it broke down with the Welsh defense reset.

It seems pretty obvious Gakpo wasn't convinced about signing for us or Leeds. Didn't Van Gaal tell him to aim higher? Seems he was right. He's going to wind up a starter for United or a similar club come January.

Group stage of tournament football, innit.

If I'm still here in 2026 one of the venues is less than 30 mins away - would be good to finally get to a WC game in person.

I live in California. You can tell how little interest there is by how few major brands have any sort of advertising tie in on TV. It's mostly seen as a sport for teenage girls and immigrants.

France seem very strong from front to back, and Mbappe looks a cut above anyone else I've seen so far. His acceleration from standing over 5-10 yards is just phenomenal. He can make space against pretty much anyone.

I did a double take at that too. Finishing was always Walcott's weakness. It's the reason Wenger never trusted him to take over from Henry. You always got the feeling that he found the corner by accident rather than placement.

100% signing players with a proven track record of top-level mediocrity s what got us into this mess. That said, whether our scouting network is up to the task of finding low experience, high quality is another matter.

Olise and Eze are comfortably better than anything we've got. As for Zaha, we haven't got anyone fit to lace his boots. The gulf in attacking quality is absolutely stark.

100%. Can't be many who expected us to be second bottom, second worst goal difference and averaging less than a goal a game at this point in the season. Alarming, and we will have to absolutely transform as a team relative to our fellow strugglers to have a chance to get out of it. At the moment we genuinely look like the second worst team in the league.

We definitely look like one of the three worst teams in the league on the basis of having watched the likes of Fulham, Villa and Leeds recently.

Has anyone ever tried to play long ball to a 5'9 target man who can only win and control the ball with his chest?

When clubs in the mix around us are hiring managers with UEFA cup winning pedigree and we're about to gamble on someone who got Luton to 8th in the Championship by lumping it up to the big man, you do have to wonder if it's time for cool heads to prevail and have a quick rethink.

It's heartening to know that the club have been looking at him closely (apparently) but I'm curious how much they can have learned when his Luton side apparently play type of football so dissimilar to ours (and that of any other team to be recently successful in the PL now that Burnley finally dropped). His league position to budget ratio must be amazing, but that doesn't strike me as a metric likely to transfer accurately at the elite level of the game.

Would be an insane bit of business.

I assumed they wouldnt do it when we had three games in a week. Newcastle and Liverpool would be free hits for a caretaker, so would be sense in doing it now.

Adams is 26. He doesn't strike the ball well unless he's leathering it in a straight line. It's a deficiency in his technique, not a matter of confidence. No amount of coaching is going to turn him into a reliable finisher. It's the kind of thing that should've been abundantly clear in the scouting before we bought him.

I remember when Rafa Silva was linked to us back when he was at Braga. His scoring record wasn't great then, but he's certainly flourished at Benfica since. One of his finishes yesterday was sublime.

Yeah, he was a very good runner with the ball. Along with Ortega and Aimar he was among the first of the "new Maradona" brigade.

Yup, unless Semmens has got about 300 million burning a hole in his pocket, I'd say he's f*cked.

Another false dawn I'm guessing. He's been in the pocket of too many CBs recently for me to assume that bullying a Championship defense shows anything other than his proper level. Though confining comments solely to the game, he was our best player by a mile tonight and caused them a lot of trouble.

On balance, our team has better defensive quality now than attacking quality. So to be picking attackers for their defensive ability is insane. Elyounoussi isn't going to be the difference between us keeping a clean sheet or not, but he might be the difference between us scoring or not.

Adams is exactly the same as Adams has always been. A modest physical presence who can't finish. He's got 2 goals in 9 games, meaning he's on track to get about 8 goals this season, which is basically what he got last season and the season before. Until last season HE HADN"T SCORED A GOAL WITH HIS HEAD IN HIS ENTIRE PROFESSIONAL CAREER FFS. The others you have a point, but the problem with Adams isn't regression, it's not replacing him with better.

Is there a similar implied term where if you're obviously way too good for us you get to walk away to a better job without us getting any compensation?