verlaine1979

Yes, god forbid we should be anything other than a team of mediocre cloggers. Hoping to occasionally be a nuisance to bigger teams, because all we have are nuisance players. But at least they give their all at the same time as giving the ball away over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

I'd choose a player with a terrible attitude and a great first touch over the opposite every single time.

McCarthy as number 1 cannot be the plan. He's just unbelievably dreadful with his feet, and alongside Bednarek being unable to pass more than five yards, it screws up 20% of our back-line build up. If he was an incredible shot stopper like Niemi, you might put up with the shortcomings in linking play, but as it is, he brings pretty much nothing to the table.

If Napoli is the level of club seeking his services next year, we won't be in the conversation at all. And to be honest, for the past month or two he's been playing like he knows he'll be making a step up next year regardless of how our season ends. No idea how Napoli play these days, but Mertens et al always played on the shoulder, which would suit him a lot more than our painfully slow build up.

Unless the owners come in with a £50m-ish kitty, I feel like £70/80m is worth more to the future of the club than JWP. If we're not confident of being able to more than replace his defensive and goal contributions with 2x£25/30m players and one £20m player, our scouting and recruitment departments might as well give up.

Problem with both our keepers is that they can't play out confidently from the back. I could live with the occasional (or even semi-regular) howler if I felt that they weren't undermining the basic foundation of the way the team wants to play. Now whether it's sensible to expect your keeper and CBs to be comfortable on the ball is another matter entirely (though I much prefer teams who try and play that way over ones that don't).

Your memory is faulty. We didn't have stats in those days, just raw prejudice.

It hasn't been this fraught on saintsweb since the Steven Davis underrated/overrated wars of 2017.

Spot on. Complete stupidity to consider the Arsenal result as anything other than a phenomenal keeping display. We got battered and nicked a result. You build on that spirit, not on those tactics.

How are they able to create decent chances from slow possession around our box, but we have to go back to our CBs the minute our pace slows?

We have absolutely no idea what we're doing in possession. Shuffle it out wide, realize that *gasp* our wide player is marked; shuffle it back inside. Repeat. Lose possession eventually.

Fair points - we have to start from somewhere. The main thing we need now is enough cash for a few of them to fail. You can't build a model in which every youngster you recruit turns into a sellable asset, which is what we had to do during our one-in-one-out era. Hopefully the new owners will give us enough room to speculate a little. One Haaland or Sancho pays for a lot of Emre Mor and Maximillian Philipp etc.

Not sure how high-profile we are tbh. A few years of PL shop window is a good selling point, but our form over the past few years has been so inconsistent that I'm sure it will give some of our targets pause.

Dortmund's model is great, but probably only plausible in Germany. They can pretty much guarantee any promising 20 year old they want from any league in the world a couple of seasons of high profile, Champion's League football at a well-run club, and then an easy pathway to sale when the time comes.

Spot on. Nice to dig out a result, but a staggering lack of quality in our build up. Dire.

Great defensive display, but we're absolute gash on the ball at the moment.

That miss today was classic Che. He's just a technically dreadful finisher. He can literally only hit the ball straight in the direction he's moving. Even his finish against united was whacked in a straight line in off the post - no bend to it at all.

Bit of a whiff of Quincy Promes about this one. I'll believe it when I see it (and in that respect, it will be a very loud statement by the new owners if they do manage it).

I suspect that's one of the reasons he looks so special in clips now. It's not that there aren't players now who could wade through challenges without going down, but with the game the way it's been over the past twenty years, what's the point? Take the positional advantage of a free kick which you're more likely to score from anyway, protect yourself from injury, move on. He's got great control, pace and strength, but I'm not convinced a lot of it isn't rose tinted glasses. On that evidence, his finishing was substantially worse than any number of modern greats you could name.

I feel obliged to remind everyone that Steven Davis was massively overrated just to give TWar a bit of a break.

The unfortunate truth about both Armstrong and Adams is that I wasn't at all surprised that they both missed those chances yesterday. Neither of them are technically good strikers of the ball.

It's just a question of quality. Both their second and third came after we squandered great attacking positions through Moi's indecision and Che's agricultural finishing. Though to be fair, it's not as if City were under the cosh until the pen. There was plenty of panic in our box the first ten mins of the second half that suggested they'd get at least one more, and so it's proved.

Cancelo passes better with his wrong foot than any of our players do with their dominant one.

Finishing makes the difference, as always. Adams and Armstrong just both strike the ball poorly and that's never going to change.

Broja is running on th shoulder of his CB when we bring it forward, but Elyounoussi doesn't trust himself to play the through ball. Goes wide instead and another block. Got no creativity down th middle.