Midfield_General

Add Farmer Saint to Glasgow/ Heisenberg/ Nairobi/ Gio's ever-growing list of alternate log-ins

Bloom = 100% data-driven. Result - has made himself into a billionaire and has taken a club from the brink of extinction and established them as a consistent top 8 and European contender. Rasmus = 100% bullshit-driven. Result - has made himself and the club he claims to lead into a laughing stock.

Except in their case it’s actually a real suite of software and tools that Bloom has successfully created and used for almost 20 years to make himself personally worth over £1.3bn, whereas what Les Reed used to smugly boast about always just felt like a slightly above average scouting network, dressed up in bullshit, and which coincidentally stopped working once we stopped being able to recruit elite managers like Poch and Koeman who had exceptional personal networks of talent they could plug the club into for the duration of their stay.

It's hardly luck at Brighton. Tony Bloom, Brighton's owner, created and owns his own data analytics company with proprietary software and algorithms which he has been using to create competitive advantage since 2006. He has gained access to a depth of data and analysis that no-one else has access to, to consistently make informed decisions around player and manager recruitment. "Bloom owns Starlizard, a company he started in 2006 to beat the bookies by using the latest data and analytics tools to understand the sport. Starlizard has grown in the subsequent years and currently has around 200 employees. According to a betting industry insider, Bloom was using the expected goal modeling system well before anyone knew what it was, and is probably a decade ahead in terms of technology used to understand and break down the sport. Tony Bloom brought his exceptional modeling skills and acumen to Brighton to unearth and identify undervalued players all around the world, and grow them at the club into superstars." https://medium.com/@vishbs/from-extinction-to-excellence-brightons-data-driven-triumph-977abe738c1c

Here's all 47 goals he scored in 145 games for Blackburn, in the only real spell of consistent goalscoring form he's had in his career. He's never been the most cultured, but here he does at least look like a decent, hardworking forward with an eye for goal. Most of his goals were scored playing down the middle and attacking the six yard area, with a fair few coming from runs down the left channel. From this evidence, albeit against weaker opposition, create a chance for him in a decent goalscoring position and he's capable of taking it. He doesn't exactly scream Premier League quality though, and what he absolutely doesn't look like is a player suited in any way to tiki taka, or playing as a winger hugging the touchline. He's been poor whenever I've seen him play, but you have to wonder what the hell we were thinking signing a player so blindlingly obviously unsuited to how this manager wants to play. Poor as he's been, I think he has the right to feel a bit stitched up by how he's been so mis-used and not played to his basic strengths.

Derby started that season with a squad that included Robert Earnshaw, Jon Macken, Tyrone Mears, Kenny Miller and Giles Barnes, plus one-time Saints Matty Oakley and Lee Holmes. In January they brought in players including Danny Mills, Robbie Savage, Roy Carroll, Alan Stubbs and Lauren Robert. How does that stack up to our squad? They were managed by that horrible little twat Billy Davies, until they sacked him on 26th November having won only one game, and replaced him with Paul Jewell. They recorded a top-flight record 32 games without a win, and were relegated on 29th March, 19 points from safety with six games left. At the end of the season they were P38, W1, D8, L29, F20, A89, GD -69, PTS11. Even Davies had six points after 11 games though.

Cool new thread! Thank goodness there's now somewhere where thoughts on the manager can finally be shared, couldn't see any discussion of him anywhere else, especially not the 251 pages of the Russell Martin thread.

Disappointed that Dibling doesn’t start but a bit of consistency week to week isn’t a bad idea. Good to see Lallana in there. First goal will be massive today.

We spent £110m in the summer and yet it's becoming apparent that for us to be even slightly competitive at this level we're still basically dependent on an 18 year-old, who was already at the club and who's only ever played 10 Premier League games, and a 36 year-old who could only ever manage about 65 minutes even when at the peak of his career and fitness. Meanwhile four of the players we recruited can't even get in the matchday squad (Cornet, Taylor, Edwards, Wood) and two are barely good enough for the bench (Les, BBD). If that had been my money being spunked on transfer fees, loan fees and wages, someone's getting fired.

Bit misleading that headline. The article is just some podcaster saying ‘I think Archie Gray would be good for a team like Southampton because he’d be likely to play more.’ It’s just one bloke’s opinion, there’s no suggestion at all that there’s been any contact.

Mark Robins now available: - Former Man Utd player - Just been sacked as manager by Coventry It worked for us before…

Someone who registered 18 years ago dares to say they don’t mind the possession-based approach and it makes them a highly suspicious, pro-Martin new poster 🤣 If that’s you Russell, you’ve played the long game there, signing up to SaintsWeb when you were 20 and getting 500 posts in as groundwork over the course of your entire playing and managerial career. And to think people say his prep isn’t thorough enough.

Even a nice little bit of skill from Skacel to force the OG for the second one. Although with the way it bounced between his legs before he turned his man - I'm not convinced that was entirely deliberate. He was generally so anonymous for us after all that hype.

Was Bearsy an alter-ego / reincarnation of Deppo? Deppo's pre-match opposition previews were great

And those red shorts 👌

I would have got away with it too from my alpine lair somewhere between Nairobi and Glasgow if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids Love and light

The exact moment the penny finally dropped for me that he was never going to get any better. Watching it back, I think that's comfortably the worst miss I've ever seen at any level of football. So mind-meltingly bad that it almost defies the laws of physics. Let's enjoy it in full shall we. 0.48:

I heard an interesting thing earlier about how the evidence that heading the ball can cause dementia means that heading practice in training has been cut right back all the way up to Premier League level, with the knock-on effect that less practice basically means the classic defensive header is becoming more of a lost art. Some smart managers have picked up on this, and are capitalising on it by putting more crosses into the box, hence big, old-fashioned, physical forwards like Wood, who thrive on crosses, doing better than expected. No idea if the stats back it up, but it's an interesting possibility to consider when you're short of goals and have got a 6 foot 8 striker to call on. Maybe lumping it in to the big man will become the hip new data-driven trend, then Russ can get on board with it.

They haven't won yet but they've had an incredibly tough opening set of fixtures. Their first ten games have been Arsenal, Chelsea, Forest, Newcastle, Villa, Liverpool, Brentford, Man City, Brighton and Palace. That's all the current top six and not far off the entire top ten. Now they're through that lot they will see this as an absolute must-win, and they're at home, so the pressure is right on them to get a result. Their crowd turned on O'Neil at the weekend, giving it 'you don't know what you're doing', so we need to use that negativity against them. The first goal will be really important. If they get it, it could be a killer if it gets the crowd behind them. But if we can score first, then keep the ball, slow things down and shithouse them a bit to frustrate them, then the mood could get ugly and that can only help us.

Incredible. Given how prolific all those posters were, that must mean that at one point one person was probably responsible for about 40% of all the posts on here, arguing with themselves via their various alter-egos. What an odd way to live.

Worth an insurance bet

Heisenberg/ Glasgow Saint/ the fellow from Kenya has been marked by his absence this season. Love and Light. Unless...

Fernandes did go down like a sack of spuds and was obviously playing it up - to the extent that Armstrong lost patience with him and picked him up himself - but as we saw with the Onuachu shirt pull against Leicester where he stayed up and as a result got nothing, honesty gets you absolutely nowhere in the modern game because the refs aren’t competent enough to spot it unless you go down. Regardless of whether Fernandes went down easily, Young deliberately hit him in the face. That’s at least a yellow if not a red, and to not even book him for it, while booking Fernandes, must mean that the ref missed it and he thought Fernandes simulated all contact? In which case VAR should be spotting that mistake and telling the ref to review it at the screen. I don’t think you can appeal yellows after the fact though.

Nope. But Fernandes got booked for going down. Joke of a decision.

Exactly. He’s obviously not telling them to go out and make mistakes, but what he is telling them to do is causing them to make the mistakes because they’re not equipped to do it. So that is obviously very much still his responsibility. It’s like if someone ordered me to go out and juggle chainsaws - something which I am not equipped to do - and as a result of trying I ended up getting my hands cut off. If they then turned round and said ‘I told you to juggle the chainsaws, not get your hands cut off’, then I would still feel that my calamitous injuries were down to them, to some extent.