
verlaine1979
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Everything posted by verlaine1979
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We apparently had 30m for Gakpo. Use some of that to pay the compensation to get a manager we really want.
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Joe Shields leaving? What the hell is happening???
verlaine1979 replied to stevy777_x's topic in The Saints
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.
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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.
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Such a great film. One of the very best.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sadly, most of our attackers prefer to stand still and wait for space to appear around them.
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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?
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So having players close helps you win more headers? Not sure what use support is when Che is so in the defender's pocket doesn't even get to touch the ball. Moral support, I guess.
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How does the presence of other players higher up the pitch increase the number of headers and balls played in at feet/chest height that he controls? It's not like he was jumping against two players at once against Villa and Wolves. He just lost all of his aerial duels in those games while he seemed to win several against Chelsea. Maybe the quality of our long passing was much better against Chelsea, but it seems unlikely to have made such a difference that he'd be bullying Koulibaly one week and getting bossed by Mings the next.
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But it's not like we didn't punt plenty up to Che against Chelsea that he actually won lots either with his head or chest. I'm not so much talking about whether he laid the ball off effectively against Wolves or Villa - he simply never won the ball in the first place. Which is odd, as you'd think Silva and Koulibaly would come out top in that physical and technical battle every time.
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Looked like he could play as a lone striker against Chelsea. Won lots of headers, backed into their CBs and held up the ball well. Spent both Wolves and Villa games in the pocket of ostensibly far inferior centre backs. Coming just before Tuchel getting the boot, were Chelsea defenders on a go-slow?
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Where is all the priceless off the ball work Ely is meant to do? I've seen him trailing around after villa players five yards off the ball, but not actually seen him make many tackles or intercept many passes.
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Elyounoussi is an anti-footballer. He just sucks the life out of the game. Such a miserable player to watch.
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We look like we're a man down there are so few options for whoever's on the ball.
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Yup. Made a mug of Gomez and TAA tonight, though should've buried the chances that VVD blocked.
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Have we had any others in our squad that do this so consistently over the past five years? Plenty of players are unforgiving of mistakes made by their teammates, but they're usually also hard on themselves.
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Doubt he was that negative off the pitch. Always came across as pretty cheerful. Except on the pitch, where he was always far too quick to look accusingly at the rest of the team while shrugging off his own (copious) f*ck ups.