Farmer Saint

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.

It absolutely does matter, especially if your keeper is on walkabout. You expect Salah to not get away from Championship level defenders?

We are taking purely the mistakes yesterday, and goals 2 and 3 had nothing to do with ponderous football. Goal 1 was them trying to break too quickly, which was the opposite to ponderous football, but it was mostly because AMac is shit and threw into a dangerous area. All Managers are the boss from hell if you cross them - football is littered with players that have been sold out thrown out after altercations with Managers (see Beckham, David and Stam, Jaap with a certain SAF).

Absolutely, his football leads to mistakes at times, but yesterday's mistake for the first was such a cluster fuck by the 3 players that I just can't blame him solely for it. These are supposed to be professional Premier League footballers. There is no excuse for what happened for the first goal. However, even with that, we should have won as the other two had nothing to do with the football we play, it was just appalling mistakes that shouldn't happen.

I think it'll be Downes and Charles - no PL team is going to want to buy him.

But I don't think that happened yesterday, in fact considering that was Liverpool I thought we did OK, didn't you?