verlaine1979

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.

Blimey, if true, we really are broke. Wonder what the next set of accounts will reveal? Net-zero for player trading over six seasons and revenues now close to £200m a year - the catering staff must be on some f-ing huge performance bonuses.

Eh, there's zero chance that RH would've refused the chance to add some pace to the squad, so let's not pretend that this is a transfer window tactical masterclass from the club. Our current preferred formation requires a significant attacking contribution from our fullbacks, but our first choice right back is currently too nervy to cross the ball. Whether the thinning of the squad costs us is only going to be down to luck.

The thing is wages, agent fees and loyalty bonuses are highly likely to correlate directly with the transfer activity of the club. Since our transfer activity is entirely unremarkable compared with our league peers (total amount spent, record signing value etc), I see no reason to assume that these ancillary costs are vastly out of proportion with the rest of the league. In other words, they're pretty much irrelevant when asking the question of why we appear skint in contrast to the clubs around us.

If you use Transfermarkt's figures for those seasons instead, you get a net transfer spend of about -£5.5m as of 18/19 (i.e. not including Ings, as we don't know how the cost of his transfer will be offset by sales during the 19/20 season). If all the things we've been told about the way the club is run are true (i.e. no debt, no money taken out by the owner) and there's been no kitty built up over 6 seasons of cost-neutral transfer activity and bumper revenues, then we must've been subject to some quite staggering financial mismanagement.

The critical difference between him and Mane is that from his very first game, you could see that Mane had exceptional pace regardless of how you felt about the rest of his qualities. Elyounoussi just hasn't shown a single outstanding (or even above average) physical or technical quality in any game. If he had anything about him at all, you'd have seen glimpses of it by now, even if he wasn't ready to dominate games.

I'm sure someone will be along to guff on about our (entirely unremarkable) wage bill at any minute.

Presumably he simply mixed up Grumman and Gulfstream.

Wonder if Arsenal might be in the market now that Bellerin seems likely to be out for months?

Bednarek, Hoj, Romeu and Redmond all excellent. JWP much better second half, and not just for the goal (been waiting for him to strike a moving ball that cleanly for years) - he started to play much more progressively second half, got his head up and played several good balls forward. However, we still need a better option at CB. Bednarek is good, but Stephens is rubbish in the air and Vest seems to struggle getting any distance at all on headed clearances as his timing is wrong 9 times out of 10. Sign someone with similar attributes to the ones Tomori showed midweek to partner Bednarek and we might be getting somewhere.

JWP needs to learn how to play on the turn. He'll hit it backwards to a player he can see even if there's open space for him to turn into. It's a profound weakness for a central midfielder to lack awareness of the space around him. In other news, Bednarek continues to improve, doesn't he?