stevegrant

They did commit to continuing to finance the women's setup at that fans forum, tbf. The women's game does seem to suffer from a hell of a lot of dead rubbers from quite an early stage of the season - I get that with the huge budget disparity within single divisions, you'll end up with some lopsided tables at times, but they've surely got to have more teams shifting up and down each year. There are still 20% of all the games to play in the Championship, and yet there's really only two teams with anything realistically to play for. Coventry are just about still alive at the bottom but having lost 16 of their 18 games, it seems far-fetched to suggest they'll win all their remaining 4 to have a chance of staying up. If it was two down to the National League, three additional teams would still be involved right now, and if it was two up to the Super League, perhaps with one automatic and then a 4-team playoff, the season is actually still alive for everyone.

Nathan Redmond had bundles more end product than any of the wide players we currently have at our disposal.

But, as ever, it's not actually as simple as that. We've shown fairly decent aptitude against teams whose main intent is to attack us - Chelsea, Man United, Leicester to an extent - but struggled against teams who set up more conservatively. Especially at Old Trafford at the weekend, and in the first halves against Chelsea and Leicester, there wasn't a whole lot of boring or slow anything. We played at a good tempo and created a fair number of chances against both sides. We won at Chelsea and could easily have done so at Man United. The issue is how we break down teams who sit very deep and deny any space in the channels. Our crossing isn't good enough to exploit wide areas - Perraud got into loads of good positions last night but so many of his crosses ended up going straight into David Raya's arms, which was infuriating as he's generally one of our better players in that regard. When teams pack the defensive block, there aren't many sides who are good at picking holes through the middle (City probably the only ones, really, and even then we've found success against them in the past by simply overcrowding them within the width of the penalty area) so you then get forced into wide areas, which is where you need a) the delivery to be of a high standard, and b) enough targets in the penalty area capable of getting on the end of those deliveries. Under Ralph in the first half of the season, we probably had the deliveries covered, but didn't get enough players into the box to convert, and when we did get chances we missed them (that Newcastle game is still infuriating after basically missing two open goals); now we've probably just about got enough players in there, especially last night, but the quality of the delivery and - in fairness to the wide players - movement wasn't up to it. Brentford weren't any great shakes last night, IMO, but they had studied our weaknesses from wide set pieces where everyone gets drawn to the near post leaving ourselves short-staffed at the back post, and having given us a couple of warnings we still didn't take the hint and they scored from the third such opportunity.

So creative that he has *checks notes* zero assists. An "expected assists" figure of 0.3 over the entire season. He ranks below Mohammed Salisu and Armel Bella-Kotchap on this metric.

Pretty amusing that Arsenal have been to St Mary's twice in that period and haven't managed to win

Indeed. I imagine most of us have come across "that guy" in our careers, the bloke who can speak with absolute crystal clear self-confidence about any subject and can convince most people in earshot that they know what they are talking about, and yet those with pre-existing knowledge can see him for what he is - a bit of a bluffer. From what I gather from his time at Brentford, he was the "ideas guy" but also the vast majority of his ideas were ignored because there were checks and balances alongside and above him at the club to ensure he didn't go "off message". His job title was Joint-Director of Football. As mentioned elsewhere, he left Brentford 14 months ago and yet they didn't seek to hire a replacement, which seems to imply that they are happy to continue with the other DoF who remains at the club. Their record since that time would appear to back up that decision. For all that he may have used the Thomas Frank defence when talking about the Nathan Jones situation, Frank was already a known quantity at Brentford as he was working at the club with their B team, so it was easier to give him a bit of rope when the early results weren't good because they had seen his management and coaching style in action over a long period of time.