Sheaf Saint

This aged well.

From what I can work out, the last time we played a league match against our incumbent manager's former team was in April 2010 when Alan Pardew faced off against Charlton at SMS. We won that game 1-0, with Antonio scoring the winner.

Big condolences for your family's loss. He'll always be with you in spirit.

And Wycombe before that.

Not necessarily. There's loads of instances of market leading products being not as good as others available, but have been more successfully marketed therefore have higher sales and profits. Classic example is Beats headphones. For what they cost, they're really not that good compared to other brands, but every other fucker on the train seems to be wearing them. So my nomination for the thread title is - people who think they look cool wearing Beats, but they actually just look like idiots because they're happy to pay over the odds for something because the bloke who launched them is a big name. Basically the same as people paying stupid money for perfume by people like Victoria Beckham.

Yep, and there were plenty of other players back providing cover. It was totally unnecessary. Maybe he just didn't fancy playing on Boxing Day.

No sour grapes in this headline then 😅

Boom!

You need a vpn for most if not all of the streams on SS100.

Interesting they've chosen to put Bednarek's picture on the Tweet. Usually it would be someone returning to the lineup, so maybe this is a way of saying "Look, Janny B keeps his place ahead of returning captain Jack Stephens".

Unchanged from last week then. Like it.

And we were runners up when we were promoted from L1 as well.

Happy with this. I'm confident we can overtake them, and it takes points off Ipswich.

None of whom are managing even close to the numbers A Armstrong has so far, so there's no guarantee any one of those would have improved us, or would have chosen to sign if we had bid anyway.

No, because that's not the point I'm making and you know that full well. Alex claims we could have signed literally anyone. Clearly we couldn't, and he can't even name a single player who definitely would have signed for us when pressed, or would definitely have improved our squad. So signing Stewart was a gamble, given he was still recovering from injury when he joined, and there obviously would have been better options if we could literally choose anyone we wanted. But Alex is vastly overestimating our actual pull in the market, given that we'd just finished bottom of the PL with a dismal points total, been through 3 managers in 6 months, signed an unproven new manager with no experience of promotion challenges, and sold off pretty much all our best assets.

OK so which striker specifically, in that category and who moved clubs in the summer, should we have signed instead in your opinion? And can you guarantee he would have chosen to come to us?

We really do. Never seen such a ridiculous over reaction to news of an injury setback. It's unfortunate, and frustrating, for us and for Stewart, but not really worth getting the pitch forks out for is it.

Did we? Were they all LITERALLY queueing up to sign for us? But we rejected them all in favour of Stewart?

Scoff all you want, but there is more than one person on this thread channelling their inner MLT and saying a hamstring injury won't sideline a player for 6 months so there must be more to it. Whereas in actual fact that's not even what's been reported. It's just a knee jerk reaction based on zero evidence. A particularly bad one could quite easily take up to 3-4 months for full recovery if it needs surgery, and then given his low starting point with match fitness, would take him at least another month to get to a point where he might be able to play more than half a game. Like Russ alluded to, there's really no point rushing him back this season given all of the above. So yeah, we can berate the club all we like for making such a poor signing (honestly, some of the comments on here - fuck me!) But the truth is we could not possibly have predicted that this injury was going to happen.

Lots of ignorance and assumptions going on in this thread. Nobody is saying he will be out for 6 months. This injury occurred at the very end of November and the season ends on the first weekend of May, so if he is out for the rest of it then that's 5 months, not 6. Furthermore, all we've got at the moment is a vague statement from Martin (who isn't exactly well known for being succinct and objective in press conferences) saying it will be a bonus if we see him play before the end of the season. That's not the same as ruling him out completely. So no, there doesn't have to be anything suspicious about this at all. It's entirely possible, and likely, that it is a torn hamstring and not a recurrence of his prior injury that the club are trying to keep hush hush. It's just that, given his lack of game time this year, it will probably take him a bit longer to return to full match fitness than someone at peak fitness who has been playing regularly all season.

Given the latest news on the Crock Ness Drogba, any chance we can recall him in January?

All fair points. I agree he is overall a very inconsistent player, and I don't believe he makes a conscious choice to lift his game during the window before deciding to down tools afterwards. But he's obviously wanted out for a while (as shown by him refusing the contract extension) and it does seem odd that his purple patches seem to coincide with the window being open. Alex makes a fair point that his game isn't suited to our current style, so if he's really that inflexible and can't adapt to Russ's tactics then it's best for both parties if we can move him on so he can get a fresh start somewhere else and we can replace him with someone who can. I'd rather we try and do that in January than let him run his contract down and spend the second half of the season going through the motions for a pay cheque and wasting a space in the squad that could be filled by someone who a) is more suited to our setup and b) actually wants to be here.

So if we get Ings back on loan in Jan then he should start cooking again, yeah?

I don't think those stats paint a full picture though. 3 of those goals came before the transfer window closed, when his overall form and ability to impact a game spectacularly fell off a cliff. In the few starts he's had since then, he's been absolutely shocking and has rightfully been subbed off each time. You might argue that there could have been a fitness issue that contributed to this, but exactly the same thing happened last season too. He made a decent contribution for the first handful of games then went missing.