verlaine1979

Bednarek, Hoj and Romeu all put in great performances - JWP motm though.

Bednarek really does get more than his fair share of blocks, doesn't he?

Stephens trying to take us down single-handed.

Eh, you don't think an additional £35m a year on top of our regular income would make a meaningful difference to the squad? Our record signing is only £18m.

You don't understand how FFP works then. Owners can inject up to £105m over three seasons as long as they convert the debt to equity.

As owner, she'd also have been entitled to surrender our place in the league, wind up the club and bulldoze the stadium. Would you have been just as sanguine if she'd done that?

A house isn't a community asset though. That's (presumably) part of the reason why the league have ownership tests - because football clubs aren't just fungible goods that can be traded back and forth without consequences - if bad stewardship results in the collapse of a club then the whole community suffers.

Eh, this sounds like dubious gossip. The wisdom of ML buying Saints was in the fact that he managed to pick up a team with a PL standard infrastructure and academy for about £15m or thereabouts. An investment entirely vindicated when his daughter sold the club at a valuation of just under £300m less than a decade later.

No, nothing illegal about a debt-financing. It's what the Glazer's did to United.

Eh, I don't buy this reasoning at all. Lander aren't a general real-estate development company, and Gao doesn't seem to have any significant business interest outside Lander and his ownership of Saints (and Lander's value has collapsed over the past few years, making a simultaneous international expansion AND a broadening in their commercial focus quite a stretch - not to mention Gao has sold off the majority of his Lander holdings in the last few months anyway). I think it far more likely that buying the club was a way to transfer wealth to a more liberal regulatory environment. Acquire the club with money borrowed from outside PRC, and either sell it in a few years for a profit or use the club's own ever-increasing revenues to pay off the debt, and one way or another you have moved over £200m out from under the nose of the Chinese government.

Apparently reducing the size of the squad was a critical action that we had to take in January so RH would have a smaller pool of players to focus on. But is there a reason you can't just send players who aren't in contention to train with the reserve/U23 squad? Do players now have it written into their contracts that they can't be demoted like that? It would seem a more judicious course of action when your main striker is highly injury prone and your now first-choice right back is a teenager. (Obviously this doesn't address our (apparent) need to save on a few months of wages, but that's not the line the club took in January anyway).

Tell that to our penniless Chinese owner.

I suspect RH was told Gabbi wouldn't be staying when he joined, as he was one of very few saleable assets in the squad. We kept Long because we had to.

No creativity in the middle with JWP playing too deep. Struggling to create chances for the third game in a row.

You can take it as a no because I clearly implied that the answer was no. See, you can grasp the odd nuance when you try.

Eh, even if my sole source of information about our games was reading animal entrails, I'd still have a better understanding of how we're performing than you.

Recognising that we've struggled to create meaningful chances against two of our main relegation rivals isn't a betrayal of the team. Nor is being able to remember that we recently got played off the park by West Ham. This isn't complicated - you can be anxious about the probability of victory while still wholeheartedly wanting the team to win.

He didn't. I've watched the replay over and over and have no idea what you're talking about. He's a bit off balance from stretching to control the ball with his toe, but he's moving towards it when - and this is really the crux of the matters - McCarthy slides in at full throttle and wipes him out without touching the ball. There's no swerving or leaving a leg in - Barnes would've have had to stop running and leap straight up in order to avoid McCarthy, who was spreading his body as far as possible, and he has no obligation to do that. If the keeper wants to hare out and slide through the attacker, he has to make sure he touches the ball at the same time, otherwise 99 times out of 100 it'll be a penalty, as it should've been on Saturday.

Barnes clearly should've had a penalty - absolutely bang on. He nicked it around McCarthy's dive, and his momentum would clearly have led to him catching up with the ball before it even skipped out of the penalty area. In all likelihood, if McC doesn't take him out, he has a chance to swipe it with his right foot into an empty net from a half-decent angle. Sure, he hasn't exactly got an elastic touch, but I find it hard to argue that knocking it to the right, in line with his own direction of travel, somehow constitutes him not having control of the ball - it happened on the edge of the box, not the touchline. Can anyone who is claiming it wasn't a foul explain where in the rules it says it's okay for a keeper to take out an opposition player in the penalty area without winning the ball?

Has he really though? Any more than any other member of the squad who can run fast? People see what they want to see sometimes - Boufal is a flashy foreign moaner who can't defend and has no work ethic, despite the fact that he tracks back as aggressively when he loses the ball as any attacker we've had in the PL years. Long is a salt-of-the-earth sweating blood type, despite the fact that all he does is make the same curved pressing run to absolutely no effect. And yesterday at times he was just plain lazy, not picking himself up, not making the run to the corner. He's dire, and the instinct to defend players of his type is one of the reasons we've ended up with a squad full of one-paced, technically limited mediocrities. Having a player of the abject quality of Long as a long-term key member of the squad has been an embarrassment for the club.

I suppose if you could guarantee at the start of the season that we were going to scrape our way to the title with boring football, most would take that and look forward to the outcome. Otherwise I'd take progressive, intelligent football over dull every day in the expectation that either way a league title is vanishingly unlikely.

On the basis of 90 minutes against Palace and 45 against Burnley, the belief that we're already too good to go down under RH looks misguided. We already looked toothless with Ings on the pitch, and appear to have no idea how to create openings without the assistance of an opposition mistake.

Wasn't expecting the ironic post-window injury to Ings to happen quite so soon.

Ings has been unavailable or carrying an injury limiting him to the bench for a third of our league games. If that trend continues for the remainder of the season, we can expect him to miss 4-5 games of the run in. Maybe he'll stay fit; maybe he'll be injured but only for games against the top six where we don't expect much; or maybe he'll miss four games against our relegation rivals and we'll go into those matches hoping that Long, Obafemi and Austin (if he's fit too) will get us the goals we need. Since the latter is no less likely an outcome than either of the other two scenarios, I'm not convinced the club have got their risk assessment correct here. From where we are right now, safety is likely to come with a margin of only a handful of points, and an attacking reinforcement would've made securing those points a much more reliable proposition. And this is of course to entirely ignore the fact that we still don't look like we have a clue how to create goals except on the counter attack, even with Ings in the side.

Maybe half a million quid loan fee for Cedric is going to keep the wolf from Gao's door for another month or two.