saintant

Man City and Brighton do not play the slow possession based style of football you describe - anything but. If we could get close to how either of those teams play then happy days.

Let's stop publishing league tables then. Football is totally results driven whether some players like it or not - those that don't are probably playing the wrong sport.

You seem to be an advocate of the type of slow, dreary football most of us detest. Walking football is played by 50 year old men. I'm sure most of us want to see the ball moved crisply and with purpose, we want to see flying wingers taking on opponents and players charging into the box to get on the end of high and low crosses. Football is not a game of chess, it's meant to generate emotions, passion and excitement. Watch all the best sides in the world and they get you off your seat - they don't stroll around tip-tapping five yard safe passes just to say they play possession football. Possession with a purpose is what I want to see.

Looks like Lumley to me.

Nothing wrong with passing the ball to your own players - if that's possession football then I'm for it. However, it has to be with a purpose and done with a quick tempo. Pass and move, get players taking up positions between the lines and we'll make the game look a lot more simple and create more chances than we are doing currently. We seem to be trying to play out from the back but without any kind of tempo or urgency then look surprised when we get picked off. If you play walking football at the back like we do you are asking for trouble because opponents will quickly latch onto this and press hard leading to panic and errors. I'd like to see us play a mix of playing out from the back and pinging longer balls down the flanks or into the channels - there's more than one way to skin a cat and it makes us less predictable and one dimensional.

I think the fact that we paid 12 million for Baz rising to a potential 15 million has a lot to do with why he continues to be our number one. I'd be inclined to give Lumley a chance - he doesn't fill me with confidence but nor do any of our keepers. Don't think he could do much worse.

Agree regarding the system. Possession football and always playing out from the back works if you are Man City. Haven't seen many other clubs make it work and certainly not in the Championship. We now have a great squad of players but the danger is we try to be too clever and the result is we don't get the best out of them. Mix it up and stop being so one dimensional because there are other systems that work as demonstrated by Sunderland's no-nonsense attitude which earned them a 5-0 victory and it should have been more.

Quite interesting but couldn't see the point of talking about a cable-tie and the clutch on the radio car.

Read that Genk are after Zeqiri from Brighton.

I think it's more the case that Mowbray had us sussed out and set Sunderland up to get at us every time they had the ball while we tip-tapped around and got nowhere. We found ourselves completely over run very quickly and never looked like recovering. Not sure how we prevent other sides doing the same sort of number on us because you can bet coaches will be studying videos of the game.

You clearly don't watch Brighton much. Yes Dunk and Webster are no nonsense strong centre backs but they can play or De Zerbi wouldn't be picking them. A lot of Brighton's attacks start with either centre back pinging low, hard and accurate passes into their midfielders who then get on the turn and fore into opposition territory.

We've been having these arguments for over a year now and nothing changes. Therefore those defending Baz must believe zero is being done to bolster the defence in front of him. If and when that happens then presumably the goals against will reduce and errors attributable to Baz will reduce considerably. Currently he is paying the price of playing behind such a crap defence. It's a theory but I'm not convinced.

Whichever way you cut it City saw us coming and mugged us off. Not sure who were the ones involved from our club but it was one horrendous piece of business. We should never have paid anything over 5 million at most and that's being generous.

Imagine that. He might even let in 9 on his debut on a Friday night against one of his former clubs 🙂

We think player for player we are better but how much do most of us really know about any of the teams in the Championship? Sunderland outplayed us all over the pitch and their players looked the equal or, in many cases, better than ours. The danger is we have been sucked into thinking we are actually better than we are.

Every time Sunderland got hold of the ball their first though was to get at us rather than pussy foot around allowing us to regroup. A simple strategy but it worked a treat. Might be a lesson there.

Can't say we weren't warned.

Amen to that. When is the penny going to drop?

If Baz continues to make errors (I get that he's not the only one) and we find ourselves losing ground in the promotion race because of the goalkeeping weakness I think JW will have no choice but to look for another keeper in January.

I think people are disrespecting many of the sides in the Championship and assuming us Leicester and Leeds are a cut above. We learned the hard way on Saturday that we underestimate teams at our peril. Preston have been under the radar, not mentioned by anyone and sit top of the pile. Will they stay there? - who knows but I think we should discard thoughts that we are somehow guaranteed at least a play-off spot because this is going to be a tough season.

Agree on the distribution point. Highly over-rated from what I've seen so far. Like you say, he is fine at the the simple stuff but, other than that, he tends to just lump it aimlessly. Compare that to the long passes of many other keepers and he's pretty average at best.

I take your point fully on board regarding keepers not maturing until much later than other players. Which begs the question why are we relying on a guy who is 21 years old in a vital season when we are targeting promotion? Not only that, if we know he is not ready, why are we putting him through this tough ordeal and hanging him out to dry as he faces understandable criticism for making too many errors? The excuse that he's all we've got doesn't wash because he's been our first choice through a number of transfer windows now. It feels more like we have adopted the attitude that we paid a lot of money for him so he has to play. I feel sorry for the guy because he's just being treated as cannon fodder and should not be playing because he's nowhere near ready. From where I stand this is still a huge cock-up by the club.

I'm not sure anyone is making Baz a scapegoat. Many of us had concerns last season and he continues to make the same basic errors - he's not the only one and other players get called out too. Far too many shots/headers beat him that a competent keeper should be saving. People are welcome to say otherwise and come to his defence but what I see is a very weak goalkeeper. I'd love him to suddenly start making brilliant saves and cutting out the mistakes but I can't see any evidence that it will happen. Time for RM to take him out of the firing line for his own good because he isn't ready to play at this level.

Can't disagree with much of that. I'd maybe give Lumley a try in goal because, what is there to lose and perhaps switch KWP to left back and see how Bree does at right back. I get that Bree is not popular with most but he had a good season at Luton in this division. Again it's just to try something different because Manning looks a defensive liability to me which we were warned about.

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions or, of course, you may think all 11 are fine.