Sheaf Saint

I see today on Twitter that Everton have agreed a deal with Beskitas for striker Cenk Tosun. Would this effectively end their interest in Walcott, leaving us in pole position to sign him?

So the more understanding, the less wisdom?

The spend money and bounce back bit. Our club structure and business model just won't allow it.

6/1 on Bet365. Just lumped all the winnings I made from betting on Palace to win at HT on it. Will be a nice little sweetener in May when the inevitable happens.

We 100% won't do that.

AS our performance against ManU showed, we are sometimes capable of achieving that. When we apparently try to win games, we inevitably fail.

Absolutely f*cking pathetic. No fight, no desire. At 2-1 down into the final ten minutes, in a game we simply have to win, the play was just so pedestrian and easy to defend against, like it has been all season. We should have been throwing the kitchen sink at them but there was just nothing. Just the same old turgid crap we have been subjected to since day one. People can point to our lack of decent strikers, but that isn't even the biggest problem. You could stick Aguero in that team and he would struggle to get double figures for the season because we are just so incapable of creating decent chances. Whether that is down to the players' ability, or the tactics they are being asked to play is debatable, but one thing is absolutely clear - you cannot sit back on a 1-0 lead in a game like that. Palace were sh!te in the first half and there for the taking, yet somehow we contrived to make them look world class in the second half, because our clueless manager was out-thought by a dinosaur like Hodgson. So Mauricio - F*ck you and the horse you rode in on, and f*ck the board and Les Reed for allowing this situation to develop the way it has without addressing the glaring weaknesses in the squad and the coaching staff. We are almost definitely going down now. If nothing changes at board and manager level then we are well and truly fooked, because there's no way they will turn it around from here.

Nope. Me neither. Not enough quality and not enough fight. A better manager might get a but more out of the squad we have, but I fear it's too late now.

Forster would have let that in. Good save.

Clearly the much better team out there, but as we have seen too many times this season, a one goal lead is not enough for us. Palace look ineffective going forward, but they may well change tactics at HT, so I hope we can adapt and continue to contain them, because as poor as they have been they still have dangerous players. Another goal early in the 2nd half would be very welcome.

Quite a decent lineup with the glaringly obvious weakness of Long as a lone striker. Given that his only strength is his ability to bother teams playing a high defensive line and that Palace will obviously not do that, I fail to see the logic of picking him.

I couldn't watch the game today (luckily for me, it appears) but I've seen a couple of comments from people being p!ssed at how Tadic celebrated his goal. What did he do exactly?

People need to take their red and white tinted specs off and watch it again imagining it was an oppo player on our keeper. If Austin wanted to get his foot out of the way he could easily have done. It's so blatant on watching the replay that his action was deliberate and I find it hard to believe that even with a massive bias, some people can't see that. It was shocking and cowardly, and proves what many have long suspected: that Charlie Austin is a bit of a c*nt.

I don't think we have a poor squad. There are one or two positions where we could do with upgrades, but overall I believe we have a group of players who are capable of much better performances than they have been dishing up. I think that our squad evolution and investment over recent years was all geared towards signing players to play a particular system, and both Puel and Pellegrino have tried to get them playing a different way and it just hasn't worked. You could argue that a professional athlete should be more adaptable, but I don't believe our decline is the players' fault. A new manager who understands the demands of the PL and knows how to get the best out of his squad would be doing much better with what's available to him IMO. The football wasn't great under Puel, but at least we were creating chances, just failing to take them. This year with the same group of players we are not creating enough chances let alone taking them, and that can only be down to the system they are being asked to play. We won't improve under Pellegrino. We have failed to win the games we should and need to be winning against the teams around us, and that is because he hasn't set us up right. I understand the need for a defensive strategy against the top 6 sides, but we need to be fully taking the game to our opponents at home against our rivals, and the fact that we are still being ultra defensive and only playing one up front in these games is unacceptable. Time for a change of manager.

McQueen is on the bench

He's a f*cking disgrace to the shirt if he meant that. Which he quite obviously did.

Have you cracked open all of your Christmas booze already this morning?

I have no evidence to confirm this of course, but perhaps the reason he was popular with the players was that he didn't push them overly hard in training??? Just a thought.

You have a point, but surely you cannot deny there are also some serious deficiencies in our squad? It's quite obvious that the first-choice players we have in some positions are simply not good enough and need upgrading. Specifically Forster, Redmond and Davis. We also badly need a striker who is capable of being a target man in the way that Austin, Gabbiadini and Long are not, and who is fit enough to play every week.

I've just seen the goal and the pundits' analysis of Forster and the wall. Absolutely shocking. There's no way a keeper who has been regularly selected for England should be organising his wall so badly and then not actually being ready when the ball is hit like that. Inexcusable from him and the coaching team.

Koeman quite obviously did with the players he signed from the Dutch league (Pelle, Tadic, Martina, Clasie).

It's OK, he's only on loan. We can regain the title when he returns in the summer.

Great. We desperately need to find a way back into this game, so we're bringing on Redmond

This is f*cking painful to watch.

Absolutely dreadful stuff. We've got nothing going forward and Leicester look like scoring every time they get near our box. I'll be very surprised if we don't concede again, and we don't show anything to make me believe we can get back on terms. Utterly f*cking crap in every possible way. With the run of fixtures we have coming up, I can't see any way that we can avoid being out of the bottom 3 come the new year.