Sheaf Saint

Amazing how quiet the whingers have gone since HT when we've been playing quite well.

Walcott looking a little rusty on his return from injury. Is anyone genuinely surprised by that?

Because they have a very expensively assembled squad of world class players.

I think he actually did very well to get any contact on it at all. With the pace on the cross it wasn't a gimme by any stretch.

That was better. Decent effort from JWP.

Because we just conceded a goal against the current league leaders? Careful of your knees. Too much jerking can be harmful to your health.

It's such a basic failing of ours isn't it. Awful defending to leave JWP marking two men at the back post

That argument gets blown out of the water when you bring on Long instead.

Ok, lessons learned... KWP is not a LB. Ralph is obviously only playing him ahead of Perraud to placate him due to being miffed at losing his place to an 18yo. Clearly we can't drop Tino, but he was much more creative on the wing today than our actual winger, who was Elyounonymous. Redmond has had more than enough chances and will never, ever get better. Djenepo was so much better when he came on. Ok he loses the ball a fair bit but he's always trying to make something happen rather than dithering in the way Redmond does, and actually manages to get in behind occasionally. Play KWP and Tino on the right, and Perraud and Djenepo on the left, and we will cause teams much more problems than we did today.

Our first 'winnable' game of the season and we fucked it up. When we're bringing on Shane Long to try and rescue a point, you know we're in trouble. Shocking lack of quality from our attacking midfielders. Hardly surprising.

Time-wasting c*nts.

We finally show a quality build up to create a chance. And it falls to Long.

It's ok everyone. Shane Long is coming on to save us.

What a waste from JWP. Never going to score from there.

Fucksake. More comedy defending.

I counted at least 2 fouls from Wolves in that phase of play but the ref is seemingly as disinterested in this game as most neutrals probably are.

We're knocking on the door now.

"A race to see whose defensive error will cost them first" Yep, seems about right.

WTF was that!?

Christ we made hard work of clearing that.

That's twice now he's just blatantly run into Moi to stop him getting to the ball. Ref needs to keep an eye on that and give a foul next time.

He broke his ankle and suffered ligament damage while captaining the U18s in the FA Youth Cup in April, and he missed pre-season. Only just back to full training now and due to play a few games for the U23s over the next few weeks to see if he's ready to return to training with the first team. He's been doing a lot of upper body work in the gym while his ankle was recovering and he's bulked out a lot. And at 6'6" he is what people would describe in this day and age as 'a bit of a unit'.

Looking back through the records, he never made the bench again after his debut in the FA cup in Jan. Everton, like us, had a lot of injuries in the second half of last season and had a lot of youth team players (including my nephew) on the bench most weeks, but he didn't feature again. They had another young LB - Nkonkou - who was ever-present on the bench, but he wasn't even trusted to start when Digne was injured. Ancellotti preferred to play one of his CBs there instead. So his immediate pathway to the first team was pretty much blocked off. However, Ancellotti then left, and Nkonkou has gone out on loan for the season, so had he stayed things might have been different. But Everton's loss is our gain I suppose.

Not directly, but it was obviously to do with progression to the first team.

Finally caught up with my nephew today at a family gathering and had a chance to ask about this. Apparently he had told Everton months ago that he was unhappy and wasn't going to sign the pro contract offered to him, but they wanted to keep him on his scholarship anyway. The rumours put out about him having a bad attitude and refusing to train would appear to be a case of the club trying to gloss over the fact they had lost one of their brightest academy prospects, to placate the fans. I have no difficulty believing this because we've seen Saints do exactly the same thing with players we have sold in recent years.