verlaine1979

It wasn't Jonny Evans marshalling his troops like it was D Day that won Leicester the game - it was (among other things) the fact that their players could all pass and control the ball without needing five minutes and a satellite image of the pitch to make up their minds. They had Tielemans on the pitch and Maddison on the bench, while our best hope was that Armstrong would create something with his determined but very much one-paced running. To borrow Cantona's phrase about Deschamps, we're a team of water carriers with Danny Ings up front.

We're not fast or physical enough to be a top pressing side - we did well at the start of the season when teams weren't expecting that from us. As it is, we're a slow, small side, so teams with decent technique or physicality find it pretty easy to play around our press.

Apart from KWP and Djenepo, we don't have any pace to break with.

Haaland had a release clause. Not surprising for a player whose career is so clearly being engineered for the big time. Likewise see his comparatively small Dortmund release clause.

Yup - the days of Salzburg et al letting a player with 20+ goals a season go for peanuts are over, ditto for getting the best players from Holland and Belgium. People were seriously talking about Upamecano only a window or two ago, and look where he actually moved to. We have to get more creative with our scouting, but at the moment I'm not sure we have the infrastructure to do that.

We're such an unathletic team. The players we do have who are quick over the turf tend to be pretty slight (KWP and Diallo), our CBs must be as slow a pair as any in the premier league, and we don't really have anyone (aside possibly from Romeu and Adams) who I'd actually categorise as strong. Everyone else in the side just fits into a mediocre middle-ground of not being particularly fast or particularly strong. The rest of the league now seems to have figured out that as long as they don't dally on the ball during transition from defense to midfield, giving us a chance to press and counter, we can't defend and we can't lay a glove on them creatively.

You know your team is lacking in creativity when you're relying on a lanky centre back to be your chief playmaker.

Getting not just battered but outplayed by an Allardyce team. It's almost funny.

The attempted placed finish at the end of the Burnley game shows you why most of the time he just tries to hit it as hard as he can. He's got good aspects to his game, and his goal return is obviously better than many of his counterparts on other teams. Still, he'd be a frustrating first choice if that's what we end up with after Ings leaves.

You would think that if there's a chance of Jankewitz being worth real money one day, the club's business model pretty much demands that we try to retain him and get maximum value from his development. For all the calamity of his league debut, I still think he looks like the most physically and technically promising youth player we've produced since Shaw. Based on glimpses, admittedly, and not a particularly high bar to be compared against, but still. Hope he gets a proper chance before we let him go.

C'mon, scoring against League 1 Pompey and Championship B'mouth is hardly going to earn him a spot on the banner. He was good in that first leg against Liverpool, but other than that, tearing it up against lower league opposition is exactly what you'd expect a propaganda footballer like Redmond to do.

FFS he's going to be dining out on the fact that Guardiola once spoke to him for the rest of his career.

Tella isn't the finished article yet by any means, but in just a handful of cameos he's already picked the ball up between the lines and 'gone at them' more than Redmond has in the past couple of seasons. Redmond never takes anyone on in case he loses it and looks bad. He's not a propaganda footballer, he's a public relations footballer.

We're a broke club with only enough money for a single pair of fullbacks, and we're probably not going to get relegated this year. That's the result.

One of the most frequent criticisms of his game (aside from his technique) is his lack of anticipation in the box. Most of his good work happens well outside the penalty area.

Apologies, when I say 'bare minimum' I'm eliding the rest of the phrase: 'bare minimum not to voluntarily consign ourselves to relegation'. We could, of course, have replaced every departure with a 30+ year old loanee or an academy kid, but I'm assuming the club have slightly higher ambitions than the Championship.

We made three permanent signings, two of which covered huge gaps in the first XI (first choice RB after Cedric, first choice CM after Hoj) and a CB who we hope will make good a shortfall in quality that has persisted since the departure of VVD. Walcott and Minamino were both last minute punts, so yes, I'd say that replacing three players we literally had no choice but to replace and a couple of hopeful loanees was the bare minimum - especially considering how woeful the few windows before that had been.

We'll be lucky to get one attacking midfield addition over the summer, let alone two. On the basis that we've bought the bare minimum over recent windows, the highest likelihood is that we'll get none.

Even his biggest admirers on here seem to agree that he's a decent second striker at best.

Who said we would be? But with Ings likely to leave and the club having previous for not always recruiting one for one when there are options in the squad already, I'm not ruling out that we might at least start next season with Adams as our first choice striker.

He's a dreadful finisher who seems to rely on whacking it as hard as he can in lieu of attempting to place it. Every now and then one of those swingers will go in, but it doesn't change anything about his technical weaknesses as a player. He's also so scared of his left foot touching the ball that he gets himself into ridiculous situations either trying to turn or aimlessly flicking it with the outside of his right. To give him his due, he's decent as a hold up and link player, but if we have to rely on him for goals next season, I suspect our recent run of blank defeats will look modest in comparison.

Smallbone isn't a DM and Jankewitz only started being considered for the squad a handful of games ago.

His problem is that he knows his limitations and is very careful about playing within them. He's not fast and he's not tricky, so he never really tests himself in situations where he isn't odds on to win. He likes nothing more than an open lane in off the left where he can drift ten yards across defenders who don't want to give JWP a free kick opportunity and then spoon it over the bar from just outside the D. This would only make him as irritating to watch as our other conservative types, but what makes Redmond stand out is that he demands the ball and moans when he doesn't get it like a player who genuinely makes a difference in games, rather than another tedious, recycling nonentity.

It was a good window in the context of previous hugely disappointing windows. Filling three obvious first team gaps in the squad (dubious CBs, no established RB, departed CM captain) isn't backing the manager, it's doing the bare minimum to stay competitive.

If Fulham and our form over the last ten games continues for the next 13, we'll be separated by 0.2 points and what you can only presume will be their superior goal difference at that point. Of course, form is temporary, but it's not as if we've never seen clubs go on twenty-game runs of bad form over the history of the league.