verlaine1979

'slightly'

Boufal is quicker than Redmond.

Eh, every international break someone comes along to say he's put in a man-of-the-match performance against some European minnow or other. Fact it, it's been almost three full seasons since he was an effective PL player. The pace of the game has overtaken him, and most of the time he's a dithering liability.

We also sneak in a mention with: "No side has had fewer different individual scorers than Fulham (4, same as Southampton)."

I suppose you could call not getting thrashed by Watford a positive sign, but you have to be starting from a pretty low base of optimism. We pressed with a little more energy (but not a lot more organisation) in the game, which was good to see, but aside from that I don't think the Watford game showed any great advance on previous performances. Moreover, I think Hughes' decision to pick Yoshida and Gabbi was really just a cynical ploy to distance himself from Reed.

Spot on.

Hughes is the one sending out a paper-thin 4-4-2 week after week, despite the fact that pretty much our entire squad was recruited to play a different formation.

There was really no downside for Hughes picking a few of the irregulars today. It immediately reinforced the narrative that Reed was a problem, whether the result was good or bad. Call me a cynic, but I don't believe Reed has had any say over the first XI this season, and that the fault with the tactics, selection and substitutes rests entirely with Hughes.

The total market cap of Lander is under half a billion quid. I'd guess your estimate is out by a distance of several hundred million pounds.

Trump has bankrupted is companies a number of times. If you regard his tactical use of bankruptcy as 'innate business acumen' then I can only hope that one day someone who owes you a large amount of money uses the tactic on you.

Despite all the obfuscation, the clear message coming out of that interview is 'we've got no money, and should count ourselves lucky that for the moment, the owner isn't actively taking cash out of the club to support his debt' Hopefully no one will bring up their erroneous understanding of FFP. The mechanisms of FFP allow for increased capital expenditure and wage expenditure every year, particularly for clubs who aren't participating in European competition. If the owner had cash and wanted to, he could pump in double-digit millions almost every year pretty much without penalty. We've been sold down the river.

I didn't say it would happen - it's just how I interpret the thinking behind paying a fair whack for what looks on the face of it, a reserve keeper. Gunn had a lot of hype behind him when he first emerged at City, so I suspect the club jumped at the chance to acquire a young potential England international on the assumption that his value will rise significantly, despite the fact that there were more pressing needs in the squad. With Kepa and Alisson setting the bar for prices, the likes of Pickford would easily go for £50m in this market.

Seems unlikely that LR was running a private scouting operation through Europe while steadfastly ignoring the minor-league gems being served by by Wilson. Far more likely is that the job was too big for RW, so he tried to shortcut by scouting the fringes of bigger clubs like Bayern, Juventus and Lazio for prospects. That way, at least he could say that someone else with clout had already passed a positive judgment on the players he was suggesting.

Assuming the entire point of buying Gunn was so that we could play him for a season or two and then sell him for 5x what we paid, they're going to have to start bedding him in sooner or later.

I don't think it's Reed who made MH play 5 at the back all pre-season then immediately switch to an antiquated 4-4-2 45 minutes into the first league fixture. The tactical shambles is entirely of Hughes' own making.

Looking at their last few games, they seem to play 4-2-3-1 with Delofeu, Hughes and Pereyra playing behind Success.

Exploiting these opportunities so successfully that the market cap of his main business has fallen to less than half of what it was around the time of the takeover. So, an owner who never really cared about the success of the football club, who has around half as much money (or less) as he did when he bought the club (and was never particularly wealthy to begin with). Now there's a recipe for long term stability if I ever saw one...

Blimey, that isn't even remotely true. Lander are very small fry.

Eh? Play that formation with that midfield and Capoue, Doucoure and Hughes will run the game. And I wouldn't pick Vestergaard to play against an attack whose primary assets are the pace and movement of Pereyra and Delofeu.

Bundesliga not a bad shout for him - quite a few playmakers have come over from the German league and not shown anything like the same creativity in the PL.

Eh, why bother injecting a spurious moral component into this? His job is to be a part of the Saints squad, and aside from missing 90 minutes per week, I'd imagine he still plays more than enough football during training to satisfy any lingering love for the game (not that many people still love a hobby or sport once it becomes their profession). On the flip side, he's a man with a relatively short career, who you're suggesting should give up over 40% of his earnings in order to play one more game of football per week for a lower league club that would also have pretty much no chance of winning anything meaningful. And the only reason you want him to do this is to save his employer - who let's not forget only bound him to such a long contract as they believed it would increase their chances of selling him for a profit - some money. If there was some way that Forster's wages would be channeled into lifting children out of poverty or curing the sick, then sure, maybe it would be fair to accuse him of greed. As it is, any cash he walks away from will just be given to some other overpaid millionaire footballer, so I say fair play to him. Never do your employer any favours, as they'll almost never do any for you.

Eh? There's no reason to believe that if he was picked, Forster wouldn't play for us to the best of his ability. In which case, he's not in breach of his contract. If the club were dumb enough to offer him a bumper 5 year deal when there was already evidence that his form was declining, then the fault rests entirely with them. Regardless of the fact that he earns many multiples more than me per year, I absolutely support Forster's right to see out the contract he signed. If you disagree with that and think it's fine to try and force players to give up their contractual rights, you'd better never breathe a word of dissent when other players under contract try and force through a transfer to a bigger club.

We're quite comfortably bad enough to go down, and as in other seasons, momentum is as likely to play a part in who gets relegated as player-for-player squad quality. The Watford and Fulham games next month are looking absolutely crucial, otherwise we could be rooted to the drop zone by end of year.

Redmond and Lemina both playing reasonably well, but once again as a spectacle the game has been dire. The few decent moments have come from turnovers in the middle, and once again there's no real sense of any structure in how we try to create chances in normal possession - it's all very static, with the majority of running on the ball being the wide players going backwards in order to make space to recycle the ball.

We didn't lose and we had a couple of chances (though Bournemouth's chance in the opening minute and King's miss were probably as clear as any of ours) but we're still a team completely lacking in identity. Play doesn't develop - it just sort of happens randomly throughout the 90 minutes.