Patches O Houlihan

Quarshie! - Get him in the league side

We did - he's playing for Newcastle &nbsp😉

For that to happen we'd need Scienza and Armstrong to have their brave trousers on. Suspect they'll be inside forwards closer to the wing backs than usual playing against Liverpool

Plus when we get humped we can share the scar tissue around a bit 😉

yep

It actually was when you look a bit harder and see how many really quality players were sold out from beneath him - akin to Ralph maintaining our level in those early years despite having no budget.

Are you seriously complaining about the signing of Rambo?!! You seriously would have split up his purchase fee amongst "2 or 4 goalscorers" who would have made more of a difference - in a league where the average proper goalscorer now costs £25-40m. Really? You'd have played Baz or McCarthy and hoped your new £5-10m '2 or 4 goalscorers' would have pumped them in for fun. Or are you buying a £5m goalkeeper out of that "£27m" as well? See earlier comment about football fans in the modern era wanting the 'moon on a stick' and anything less shocks them to the core. Real life is hard. Professional competition is very hard: At the top level everyone is paying attention, and spending a fortune to leave no stone unturned.

I hear the club have a contact who can organise industrial size tubs of Nivea if that's any good to you?

Maybe he watches a lot of rugby - they like ‘finishers’ When we were in the Prem we used to complain that 5 subs meant we’d play the end of the game against top teams with 5 fresh superb players. Our bench was ridiculous for this game. Maybe that is the thought? Maybe Scienza knows he’ll get 25 mins. Maybe Fellows is told to gauge his efforts for 70 mins max?

Who are you lumping it up to instead? Is Arma the most likely to pull a miraculous Shane Long? Will we walk out to the Titanic music?

We now know why Lallana has stayed - Free industrial tub of Nivea to every travelling Saints fan when we get rooted

Edwards normally plays on the right so it is 'England centre back & debut scorer + Roy Keane's Son in Law' who has his natural spot. After the shambles today give Edwards a bash

We passed it sideways or backwards 420 times today. (69%) 🤦‍♂️

The issue here is that Arma is only really any good playing from inside right, and our marquee signing was Fellows who also plays on the right. There'll be pressure from upstairs to keep starting Fellows.

As much as I would like this to be the team I struggle to imagine them doing any better than 5:0.

After the performance at Hull we need this game like a hole in the head; especially with league leaders Middlesborough up afterwards. Following an abject performance there would be a temptation to drop some players and bring in some new ones hoping for an improvement. It is of course very common for a second string side to start in the league cup. So when the changed team gets humped by Liverpool, and the team that played before were embarrassed at Hull which side do you pick for Middlesborough? If Still somehow gets a result here then he will have earned his money. Realistically I think a battling 2:1 loss, where the players show they are playing for the manager and do actually have an agreed plan is about as good as we can hope for.

Have you ever accidentally stepped in dog shit? It was like that

According to Will all three/four of our attacking players like to play on the shoulder with balls played ahead of them into space. Quite how we have ended up with four of the same player seems pretty short sighted but lets go with it. When we are Championship Favourites™ most teams are going to be defensive against us. So on the occasions that they do attack us and get forward in numbers we need to be clear headed when we win the ball back, play two or three forward balls so that they can be played in. But somewhere between Russball and Will's 'don't fucking piss about with it at the back' we're now in a situation where whoever finds a ball dropping at the feet on the edge of our area either: 1) Plays the ball backwards to someone in a far worse position 2) Lumps it to no-one well past the half way line 3) Fires it off the nearest opposition player and into touch 4) Dithers and loses it in a really shit way to enable the attack to continue At no point do they look up and play a calm, well judged ball to someone in midfield who might be able to do something creative with it when they have much more space to work with.

Counter attacks don't work when it takes us 90 seconds to get the ball into their area having passed it backward nine times first.

Did you not feel this way once Kat sold 80% to Gao.

No skill on the ball. No strength or determination. Shit positioning and anticipation. Across the board. Fuck off Saints.

THB - fucking useless

Scienza has a better free kick record than Manning this year...

On starting slow: If I remember rightly RM benefitted from having genuine PL players playing for us during August and we got points on the board (Tella, JWP). Then lost 4 on the bounce with some appalling results. You could argue that Will barely had any PL players to make a start with in August - and even the good ones will have been pretty worn down by or distracted circumstances. If we were starting the RM way we would now lose the next 3 or 4. But I don't think we will. He does need to find a way to play with the players we have in the building though. His reputation suggests he'll work this out. I admit to being a bit concerned about how our strikers are going to fit into it though.

Scienza came on and got stuck in straight away. He put in a reasonably robust challenge and the Pompey player threw himself on the ground and the ref bought it. He will have been watching the match closely, and saw the same thing happen to Jander. The look of incredulity on his face from the ref's decision, and then his subsequent body language to me suggested: "Well if it's that sort of game I can be a world class shithouse, and I have the best free kick scoring record in Europe's top 5 leagues this year - bring it on" The next 3 robust challenges from Pompey he went down just as easily to mock them and the ref, and 1 or 2 were in useful positions for a free kick at the end of the game. Manning took them though, and nothing came of them.