Sheaf Saint

How did the ref/lino miss that handball? 😕

With successive managers constantly tinkering with the line-ups and tactics, it feels like a very long time since we had a settled starting 11 that picked itself. Just got to hope it helps us maintain our current form.

When you invite a friend from out of town to stay over after a birthday party, and sleep in the spare room so they can have your bedroom, and they're still in fucking bed at 11:30 the next morning.

I'm also looking at going to this but will have to wait until general sale to get a ticket as I don't have any kind of membership. Anybody got any idea how many tickets are still left?

That might have something to do with him being out on loan at Reading

Why?

Meanwhile in Pompey, someone in a shit Halloween ghost costume decided to go for a boat ride in a park...

Still a thing.

Would you prefer they went back to using RP?

Like it did for us against Forest last season? Except the chance for our travelling fans to resurrect the "your football is shit" chant. Would be worth it IMO (as long as we still win, of course).

I made this point on the post match thread. Their midfielders spent the whole match trying to advance on our back 4/5 while they were playing it around at the back, which left the necessary space for them to play forward passes into. Very few other teams this season will be quite so obliging to us, and that's the biggest problem with Russball - it only works well if the opposition are naive enough to allow it to.

There was also a blatant shirt pull on Arma in the first half as he tried to get on the end of a through ball from FD, but it wasn't clear if it was inside the box or not from the one replay they showed. Would definitely have been picked up and given by VAR if it was because the ref missed it completely.

I think I get it now. You could see today when we were playing it around at the back that the players were waiting for a certain amount of Brum players to commit forwards to try and press us, or for certain Brum midfielders to cross a certain threshold, before going for the forward pass into the space they had left. When Brum made the sub early in the second half, it took us a while to adapt to their new patterns, and as a result we conceded and then had a wobbly period while we worked out who would press where and when. Once we did though, we retook control of the play and from there on Brum obligingly fell into our trap of drawing them out. I've been very critical of Russball so far, but today it worked perfectly, bar that 5-10 minute spell around when they scored.

Don't relax just yet. Still got 8 mins of injury time to navigate.

Jesus. Gone from totally in control to on the ropes.

Good points, but the bar for what constitutes a foul in the box is always higher. I'm just pointing out why it's not a 'clear' penalty. Giving them a free shot from 12 yards would have been too great a reward when you consider the attacker had already messed up his chance to score.

Now THAT should have been a penalty. Blatant shirt pull on Arma.

Not really. It looked clumsy, granted, but the attacker had already won the header and fluffed it, so the collision didn't prevent a goal scoring opportunity.

2 shots on target, 2 goals. Feels like it's been a very long time since that has happened in our favour rather than against us

Now that was a fucking lovely goal. Come on Saints. Let's put them properly to the sword now.

And your problem with it is?

That'll teach me to read posts properly before replying then 🤣

People being so anal that they feel the need to highlight the pedantry of others 😉

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67233090 Another one? anybody would think there is some kind of problem with the culture within the Tory party at this rate.

On the positive side, we've had two away games up north in 4 days and come away with 4 points despite not playing too well and having a patched up defence for one of those games. Taken at face value, we can't grumble too much and I would have happily taken that beforehand. However, there's no escaping just how poor we were tonight. Despite KWP's excellent goal, we created nothing of any quality whatsoever. The difference between us and Preston when it came to attacking was stark. Our build up play is just so ponderous and easy to defend against, it's pathetic. We have some quick players but we never play to their strength by actually attacking at pace and stretching teams. It's so fucking obvious that we should be trying to do that more, but the deliberate passing around the back instead is just painful to watch.