James

Quite.

Astounding isn’t it? How Tadic and Redmond have stayed on and Gabbi has been sacrificed I do not know.

Another MP sub booed. Poor decision by a poor manager.

We must be pretty bad at breaking most teams down then...

To be fair, compared to recent games that can be considered regular.

Southampton nil...

Redmond is garbage. That is all.

Yes but this seems to be a leaf out of the Steve McLaren Middlesbrough coaching manual - throw as many forwards onto the pitch at once as possible and hope for a goal. People are asking for more attacking style and intent (ie not sitting back as soon as we’ve scored) rather than advocating a totally unbalanced side.

Agreed. Some pretty odd decisions being made, it has to be said.

Didn’t think it was possible for us to find a more stubborn manager than Puel but, hats off to Les, he appears have managed it.

Think it was West Brom at home where we tried it, it didn’t work and we never tried it again. Some of our best performances last year were with JWP on the right crossing low for Gabbi. We haven’t tried that yet this year I don’t think.

Exactly. If MP is so worried about our defence then why not stick with it?

Redmond, Boufal and Tadic in the same team will be interesting. More attacking for sure but can see us getting bullied by a hard working Burnley.

Odd to chop out Hoedt again. Don’t really understand that.

Agreed. My old man called his major weakness in his very first start for us away at Liverpool when he was slow out/down to that one on one against Sturridge. Not a mistake by any stretch but immediately illustrated his limitations.

Makes his appointment all the more bizarre. Wasn’t exactly raining goats at Alaves last year was it? Reed has a lot to answer for I think. Looking for the next Poch, a man he might not even have unearthed in the first place.

How are you supposed to score doing that? Ridiculous. Seems odd that we sacked Puel because he wouldn’t employ a more attacking style only to employ another dullard defensive manager. Whatever happens I can’t see MP lasting more than a season unless he changes things.

I agree he will do well at Leicester (and I also wanted him gone last summer) but they've got a decent squad of decisive attacking players. Puel played to our strengths which was to keep us tight and try and nick a goal. When we did create chances our woeful strikers contrived to miss them unless Austin or Gabbi were playing. On Pellegrino, it doesn't seem to me like he actually knows what he is doing. Looks a terrible appointment at present.

I normally agree with a lot of what Pamplemousse says. Fair play, in hindsight, Puel was a better manager than I thought and I'd swap him for MP given the choice but "World Class"... no way in hell.

NC may not have signed those players, but neither did Reed.

It's classic MLG - correcting people for the sake of it. Boring.

Yes, MLG I'm comfortable with my grasp of the English language. Thanks for clarifying though. Much appreciated.

How on earth do you know that? He's been long term injured and hasn't been given any game time in the league at all. He was fine in his sole appearance at home to Sunderland where we kept a clean sheet. Forster has been awful for the best part of a season and a half so to say McCarthy will be worse with absolutely no evidence to the contrary is complete "pony".

Wasn't good today. Bar the relatively fortunate penalty I can't remember him touching the ball in the second half. We must be the only team that isn't willing to give our top scorer from last season any kind of chance to show what he can do. He must have spent a fifth of the time Long has on the pitch this year and has already scored.

Absolutely but at least when Poch left we appointed a big name manager who was well respected and used his influence to help us acquire players of a significantly higher quality than we've recruited recently. We could have kicked on from our strongest ever position by appointing a high profile replacement for RK but unfortunately, to the watching world, we lost our most successful manager to a team that finished below us by some distance and then subsequently to appoint a manager that almost noone had heard of and who the players (allegedly) took an almost instant dislike to. Given some of the managers on the market during the summer of 2016 we clearly made the wrong choice and its looking like we've done it again with MP. Reed should, IMO, stop looking for the next Poch and appoint the best man for the job. I'd like to speak to someone at the club to work out how it was concluded that, following an "extensive" interview process it was determined that MP was the right man for the job. His record at Alaves for example didn't exactly scream that he'd sort out our goal scoring issues and he's only served to make us worse defensively.