verlaine1979

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?

I think you can take it for granted that he wasn't including getting relegated in that analysis. SR didn't spend nearly 200m on the club and invest another 70m on players for us to get relegated, lose most of our income, most of our equity as a PL club and have our best players cherry picked for less than they're worth because they refuse to play in the Championship. They want the club to be a showcase to power a business model based on player sales. That means staying up and playing football that allows our young players to show their ability reasonably frequently, even if the exact league position isn't as important to them.

Be amazed if Poch goes to Villa. There are exceptions (Ancelotti being a big one) but you're generally only as good as your last job. As ex-PSG boss he's currently in line for Juve, Barca or whoever pulls the trigger next on their current manager. If he joins Villa he goes back to being a mid-table PL manager who hasn't won much.

This. We're absolutely rubbish in possession. Whenever we try and play keep-ball, every single pass is played under intense pressure until it invariably gets nicked or goes back to the defense for a hoof forward.

We apparently had 30m for Gakpo. Use some of that to pay the compensation to get a manager we really want.

It's not as if Shields came here and decided to invest solely in youth on his own. That's the stated strategy of our owners: buy unproven but highly rated talent, give them a platform for a few years and then sell high and start over. Blaming Semmens et al is pointless. The people who spent almost two hundred million on us have a plan for how to sustain and return their investment, and that's player trading. No employee of the club has the power to overrule a policy set by the owners, no matter how much they think it goes against conventional football wisdom. We recruited Shields because, arguably, no one has been better at spotting youth talent in Europe recently than Manchester City. Whatever anyone says now, it's a huge blow that a key figure in achieving the club's financial and footballing strategy has decided to leave after only three months.

Often looked like men against boys when we've played them over the past few seasons. Suspect it'll be more of the same this time.

Blackmore misses the point. The unhappiness isn't with our league position, it's with our supine performances. We're playing without character or purpose, and there's no excuse for it. Whatever the individual talents of our squad, a good manager would give the team a system and identity. Currently we have neither, and haven't since pretty much the end of our little post-pandemic burst of form, when we moved the ball quickly, passed it forward between the lines and had players looking for space rather than holding their positions while the game passed them by.

Such a great film. One of the very best.

Forest were lucky to walk away from that with a point. They went into hiding after the goal (sound familiar?). They're the only team I've seen with as little sense of how to move the ball as a team as us.

I'm pretty sure you're remembering it wrong. We were very speculatively linked with him, and large corners of the fanbase laughed their heads off at the idea that we'd be getting someone as high profile as Tuchel. His next job was PSG.

City have won their CL game by half time. They'll probably give Haaland ten minutes in the second half to wrap up his hat-trick and then rest him for Saturday.

Che and AA are the best value pair of 15m (or under) strikers signed in top-level European football during that time? I can't be arsed to look at the numbers to validate that claim, but I'd be stunned if it were true.

I remember around the time we bought AA, someone from the Blackburn forum came on and said he wasn't that quick and needed 5 chances to score 1. Dazed by his highlight reel from the season just finished, I assumed it was just sour grapes, but they were spot on. He's not that quick and his finishing isn't that great (though he's capable of better finishes that Che). Adams on the other hand was just an obviously poor finisher from the moment we started being linked to him. You could see it from the kind of goals he scored for Brum.

Sadly, most of our attackers prefer to stand still and wait for space to appear around them.

Incredible. So you're saying that if Elyounoussi had been standing a few yards closer, Adams wouldn't have looked like a small child jumping next to Tyrone Mings?