verlaine1979

There's no pace or physical power in this team, and our technical players just aren't good enough to make up for it. Utterly, utterly bullied throughout the whole game, by a team who look better on the ball too.

Watford look a lot more powerful than us - several runners in their midfield able to carry the ball forward. Looks like a cut-price re-run of some of the first Mouinho-era Chelsea/Arsenal games with us in the role of the Wengerian powderpuffs.

He's more than three times as productive in attack than Davis - how much better do you want him to be? And it was only last season that Davis ended up being shunted regularly back into central midfield - he's played an awful lot of games for us as the central attacking midfielder with Tadic directly alongside on left or right.

I don't really have a horse in this race, but it's funny to think that the only thing holding Stephens back from being good is actually being good at the two most fundamental aspects of his position...

Not saying it'll necessarily make a difference, but the Tadic/Boufal/Redmond experiments were all previously done with Romeu and Davis at CM/DM rather than Romeu and Lemina. Having more of a presence behind that three might make us harder to play through and more able to regain possession.

So you can't conceive of any reason why a player who arrived at the end of the window, carrying and injury, and who was never given the benefit of a guaranteed few starts to play himself in, might not be showing his best in the odd substitute appearance and low intensity cup match? Equally, you can't think why a manager of a team with quite a fragile backbone might deliberately pick 'senior' players who have done okay under predecessors in order to play percentages and reduce the risk of being perceived as failing early in his new job? Then again, you insist on calling him 'Davo', so you're not really likely to provide much in the way of nuanced, thoughtful analysis, are you?

If anything, I'd say Boufal is vastly more tenacious in his will to win the ball back than any of our attacking players. Just as some players in our squad benefit unjustly from lazy national stereotypes, so others are punished for them.

Wasn't it him that got clumsily sucked into the ball for the one-two that put Griezeman through for the first? Again, arguably not a lot of shame in being made to look lumpen by one of the nippiest attackers in the world...

Why get carried away over the fine margins of last season? We lost our last game, and it was essentially out of our hands whether we finished 8th or 14th. Would you fundamentally revise your opinion of the club's strategy if a couple of goals hadn't been scored on in the last twenty-odd minutes of the season and we'd wound up dropping 6 places?

The idea that there was a consensus that we only needed to strengthen at CB and DM is revisionist nonsense. Despite losing Fonte and VVD last season, we wound up struggling more profoundly up front than at the back. History suggests that high 30s/low 40s in goals scored is an eminently relegatable attack, so we're really counting on these defensive additions being the difference.

I honestly don't know. We've got a scouting and analytics department that loves to pat itself on the back, so I suppose I'd like us to bring in someone I've never heard of, but whom our scouts and analysts believe has a reasonable chance of making it in the league. I'm not asking for or expecting a guaranteed impact - just a chance of improvement, which we wont have unless we bring in new blood. Also, not to labour the point, but its not as if all the great players have already been found - Kante, Mane, Mahrez - all emerged in the PL in the last three years, without Europe-wide battles for their signatures at the time.

Guff. Plenty of people have been asking for an upgrade at #10 for a couple of summers now. Moreover, it's hardly asking the earth for the club to bring in 3 reasonable signings (and there's no way Bednarek counts towards that).

I think what people are asking the club to do is at least try to resolve the problem with our attacking midfield, rather than just throwing their hands up and saying it's too difficult to find anyone. Of course we can't buy the handful of players out there who are proven to be the best performers in this position, but we can't buy the best centre backs or defensive midfielders either - our whole transfer model is about finding the players who'll eventually show up on the radars of bigger clubs once they're playing for us. You're right though insofar as Boufal was presumably an attempt to do this last year, so its very frustrating that he seems to barely get a look in.

Even odder then that the only reason other managers were mentioned is that Davis continuing to be picked by consecutive Saints managers was held up as evidence that he must be great (rather than simply the only player available).

He's a striker, so his goal return is going to diminish the further away you pay him from goal. He won't get more than a couple playing as a second striker/attacking midfielder - his technique isn't good enough, and his pace will count for less.

With Long, you're not asking him to put last season behind him, but to rediscover the form of his one decent season under Koeman. Last season was just slightly under par for SL - 5 or 6 league goals a season is about the most you're ever going to get from him.

Evidence for the prosecution #1 - this is utter, utter tripe, and nobody other than Davis would get such blinkered, revisionist benefit of the doubt.

Hmm has 'most underrated player in the PL' simply been a synonym for 'average' all these years? If so, please accept my apology, I obviously missed that memo about how we're all using superlatives differently in English now. Oh, and Iain Dowie? Mediocre Northern Irish ex-pro over-praises current Northern Ireland captain? Colour me surprised.

Your inability to imagine that my criticism of his ability stems from anything other than a personal vendetta is a weird quirk of character that I guess you'll just have to live with. As I've already explained many times, if he wasn't constantly held up as an exceptional player (indeed at one point hailed as our best signing in 40 years on here) I'd never have bothered speaking up, just as I rarely bother saying anything about the other mediocrities making fine careers for themselves in our squad. It's only that the praise of his contribution is so massively overblown by the weird alliance of hipsters and nostalgics that make up his fan club that I felt compelled to point out that you're all completely deluded.

Like I said, the BBC commentator summed it up quite differently, and having watched the move repeatedly, all I see are four over-excited Huddersfield players getting sucked into the ball early on. But sure, feel free to rely on journalistic penchant for cliche and received wisdom all you like.

I've always said he does the simple stuff reasonably well (though his passing has been awful at times already this season). I just want someone in that position capable of doing more than just the simple stuff. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've been moaning about us being one-dimensional in attack for about three seasons now, which pretty strongly correlates with the period during which Davis moved from being a reliable sub to a nailed on first-teamer. It's coincided with some success for the club, but also a fair amount of dull, frustrating football. We struggled for goals under Puel, and appear to be struggling now, but we also had long stretches in each of Koeman's two seasons (9-10 games each if memory serves) where we created and scored very little (masked, in part, by a couple of blow-out results that glossed our GD quite substantially). Having more quality where Davis plays would make us less predictable, and less reliant on the supremely ropey crossing of our wide men and fullbacks.

Oh come off it, the ability to play a simple straight pass into what the commentator describes as 'all kinds of room behind' when four poorly drilled Huddersfield players have been sucked towards the ball is just the bare minimum for that position, not an example of game-running attacking nous. A 'lovely through all' bisects a well-set defence - all Davis did was pass between four players who weren't where they were supposed to be.

The central attacking midfielder has to do more than shovel gentle passes out to the wingers and fullbacks for 90 minutes, especially when crossing isn't the strongest point of any of the wide players.

We've really clicked in attack since unshackling Davis from defensive duties and returning him an advanced position. As so many have said, so many times - he's really crucial to the way we play.

The fact that our most potent attacker contributed 7 goals and 1 assist in 37 games (in other words a meaningful score-altering contribution every 4.6 games) speaks volumes about how very dull we've been to watch of late.