Farmer Saint

I don't think any actually is fully defending him, but I think people are dispelling the narrative that everything that is wrong is purely down to him. He needs to go if we want to stay up, but we came up with the worst team, didn't invest nearly enough in PL players (due to PSR) and were favourites to finish bottom. We're just keeping up with the predictions.

Cornet is on loan, so hardly spaffing millions. If we'd have bought him with little resale value, then I agree, but we didn't. The problem we had is we had to spend £50m of so to go backwards versus our team last season. BBD, Wood, Edwards, are all for the Championship for when we get relegated - they were relatively low cost but would do a good job there next season. Archer was a replacement for Che, but think we'd all prefer Che back. That left us with £60m, the need for a good keeper, and then a massively disjointed squad. They knew we had no chance with that so went low cost, high upside, resale value on the rest. What I find quite strange is that you all get angry and take the piss out of Rasmus for being a visionary and doing things differently, yet as soon as I put together a slightly out there (but at the same time not unreasonable) scenario, there is no chance it could be correct. I never said any of this was fact, and yes, it may all just be a coincidence, but I'm sticking with it - and nothing that I have seen has made me think we are not planning for several scenarios with no real care for which one happens.

Considering you're persisting with the £100k thing when I literally said in my next post it was over-egged, I won't bother reading the rest of your diatribe as it's bound to be made-up, gaslighting, bullshit.

Both have significantly better players than we do though. Our best player last season couldn't get anywhere near the West Ham team. The gulf is huge.

Absolutely - I'm not arguing with you here.

They'll try...

I would add my two pennies worth, but you've heard it all before as I've been telling you all this for 18 months. However, in bullets: - Getting promoted first season in the Championship was not good for the long term of the club becoming a sustainable PL club. We needed to build a strong core, but the basis of that core was loan players. - We needed to spend £200m to stay up in the PL, but PSR innit? - Once we got promoted, strategy had to change due to lack of real money to spend, especially on wages, leading us to become a player trading club with low cost, low wage, high upside players to add to top of Championship players to ensure "bouncebackability". Very easy to criticise, as the usual suspects no doubt will, but I called all of this before Summer 2023, and it seems to have all come true so far. Quite a coincidence how lucky all my guesses are isn't it?

Thanks for thinking of me ❤️

And that is a good example of it. But the other example is that we were the 2nd highest scorer with the most shots of any team in the league.

It's because most strikers now are not traditional strikers, they are system players. We're just not able to identify the correct players for our system. If we continue to play as we generally do, we need a striker who is great with his back to goal, to hold up the ball and lay it off. We bought Archer, who plays off the last man for when we break at pace (hardly ever), and BBD who is meant to be an inside forward but is playing a bit too wide to make up for a lack of full back overlap when we play a back 4. BBD is also shit.

A lot of people on here were laughing about Ipswich signing Delap...

But why isn't it? Is every season irrelevant when forecasting future performance then?

No, I think we'll have a better team if we go down this time, and if Martin by some miracle is still here, the team will already know his football - we should be in a better position overall.

Yet it was last time?

I am well aware of that, thank you. I think we'll have to agree to disagree here as although the defence is and has always been an issue, I don't think that's the issue here.

This is mad - that goal was McCarthy's fault, 95%. It's ridiculous to pin blame like this on Martin when you have actual ammo. What next, he told Suga to angle his body a certain way but it ended up with him handballing it?

It's a no-brainer for pretty much everyone. Doesn't mean it's possible though.

Yeah, we could, but our defence is so bad we need that extra man. We also then have to get width another way, and our wide players are Fraser, Sulemana, Cornet...hmmm. We're better through the middle, and that's why it makes more sense that we use our wingbacks (who actually are good going forwards) in a back 5.

Did Ched Evans spike her drink?

It can't be that mate - was saying that 6 weeks ago and everyone was telling me how wrong I was.

Downes won't go to the PL I wouldn't have thought - he's been poor this season and didn't get on well at Wet Spam - he's a very good Championship player but that's it.

Can't happen mate - I've been ridiculed over the last 6 months saying that's what we're doing.

Rarely in a back 5 TBF. Very few teams (and I can't think of any in the Prem) play a back 5 with fullbacks and not wingbacks.

But that's playing wingbacks and being exposed on transition. If we need to play 5 at the back because we think we have more chance as our defence is utter jank (as we did in the playoffs last year), then that is always likely (unless we play a fixed 5, but that gives us no chance going forward) - the fact is you need the CBs to shift across to that LB position to stop that happening. Either way it's unlikely you're going to stop a team like Liverpool getting a chance like that. The reason we conceded was due to McCarthy being in absolute no-mans land.

But it was McCarthy who was the biggest fuck up and the reason we conceded there.