S-Clarke

Phew. Shame about Stu though. We keep dropping like flies!

I think you'd be looking at more than £1m. That guy at Preston had 6 months left and he still went for around £2m. Truth is we didn't have a million, we managed to scrabble a 500k loan fee together, but that in it's self would have been aided by the Shane Long departure and the fee that brought. So whilst that would have been a decent idea, we don't even have the money for that. Close to freebie loans is all we can muster at this moment in time. Let's see what the summer brings.

The Red Card has been overturned. Common sense prevails. It's a shame it didn't on the night.

Absolutely correct decision. I'd have given up with football if that hadn't been overturned. Now they need to demote Dean.

Unfortunately we needed an extra attacker up top (Adams) and we needed to be creative with who we sold in order to allow that to happen. Targett wasn't amazing, but he'd be a damn sight better squad option than we've had there for the last year.

Ah gotta laugh, gallows humour is all we have at the mo!

Look at in with Context. If Big Sam or Bruce had lost 9-0, that would probably be after they've given their fans 9 months of suffering from shit football, no progression and crappy park the bus tactics. On the other hand, we have thrown in two 9-0's, but we have actually been better than most teams in the league between those two 9-0's. We're a bit like Leeds, it's a high risk, high reward approach. I'd just like to see us actually thrash a team though as our approach should allow for it.

There is no relegation battle. We aren't in one, haven't been in one and won't be in one this year. For the first time in a good few years that isn't even in the realms of possibility, so you can sleep easily.

Sad, but doesn't surprise me. Lots of keyboard warriors out there, sat in their dark rooms tapping away on their keyboards. The vitriol he was getting on here was bad enough, you just felt it could spill out like that.

Seriously, wtf. If anyone doubts corruption, watch that. Something stinks.

And 4-0 when we had a perfectly good goal chalked off. It ended in that hugely embarrassing score line because of the referee, no more than that.

Absolutely right. I'd be staggered if we didn't. 'Pundit' Referees don't believe it was a red card, Martial doesn't believe it was a foul, Ole doesn't believe it was a red card. Literally no one, other than Mike fucking Dean believe it to be a red card. As others have alluded to, overturning this will mean making one of the 'STAR' referees and their VAR approach all wrong. Can they do it....?

And that will be why football is truly dead. They are condemning us to ANOTHER defeat based on shit referring decisions if they don't overturn it.

It wasn't even a penalty. Let alone a foul. Let alone a red fucking card! You can quite clearly see, on the number of replays I saw, that Bednarek didn't do anything to cause Martial to collapse like that. Nothing. You could argue maybe slight accidental touch, but he was pulling away from Martial to avoid that. At absolute worse that's a 'double jeopardy' situation, whereby Jan gets a yellow and they get a pen. I just cannot make any sense of the red card. The review of it was a cluster fuck. He was desperate to give them a penalty, even a commentary feed mentioned that he looked happy to be giving it. They gave him the chance to look at the screen but he's never wrong is he, they didn't even bother showing it in full motion. Shambles, needs investigating. If that isn't rescinded then I've lost all hope in football and as far as I'm concerned the game is dead.

Ex players is an interesting idea. I think whoever is controlling var needs to be away from the referees, a team external to the referee committee. What you have at the moment is a mates club and they're all looking after each other. A game is basically refereed twice, by the same people. You don't need 'referees' running VAR, you need neutral controllers of it who have a view of the game as a whole.

They should also be demoted to the sunday league, but then I wouldn't want them influencing those levels either. They should just retire. They could get a cushty job like peter walton on BT Sport, sat in the warm co-commenting on premier league games. Then we can just mute them when they come on.

She's well and truly in the 'shit owner' category for me as well. I find that hard because of what the family have done for us, but her involvement in recent years has been really poor. She couldn't wait to get out. Maybe I was naïve, but I didn't imagine KL selling us up the river to a dodgy owner. I thought she'd ensure we were in good hands. How wrong I was. A lot of blame should be at her door.

Good post, a rational view after a haunting evening. The context is certainly different to that of the Leicester one, I feel that's why our views are a little more muted than after that game. We were dealt a poor hand all evening, nothing went our way, no 50/50's. Zero. The referee single handily destroyed some of our young players. Ramsey, Tchaphat. They'll do well to come back from this one and play at this level after that. Cheers Dean you absolute cockwomble. I thought Ramsay was doing ok up until 15 mins as well! But he stood no chance and it's true that Utd kept targeting his side. I appreciated the heart showed by Armstrong, JWP and Moussa - they kept going. Moussa, whilst he didn't offer much quality, still worked his arse off in testing circumstances. He's a likeable character, just needs to start having more impact in an attacking sense. The other saving grace is our start to the season, we're not in danger of being sucked into any trouble. Let's just re-group and have a decent end to the season. I still think 40-50 points will be a decent return for us, bottom half of mid-table. What happens in the summer is anyone's guess. But let's just feel fortunate that we can relax (as fans) a little bit for this season.

No.

If we're totally honest, it's 4 goals in 8 league games. And maybe 5 if we get that pen v Villa. It wouldn't look so bad then.

He can be discounted as he's an inept fool himself.

I've not found anyone yet who has agreed with that decision. Even Utd fans!

Ralph didn't say it exactly, but I believe he also feels exactly the same. You only have to look at the stupid cunt dancing around in the Tranmere stands to realise what a tool he is. It's always had to be about him. Number 1. Focus has to be on Dean no matter what. How he's lasted so long at the top level is beyond me.

We've got a few issues at play and it's turned into a bit of a perfect shit storm. 1) We spent stupid money on the likes of Elynonoussi, Hoedt, Lemina, Carillo, Boufal to name just a few. That has hamstrung us hugely in terms of the wage bill and also available transfer funds over previous seasons, as we probably have to take into account on-going payments every year for some of those players. We're not going to be able to use that excuse for ever though. 2) COVID - no fans, no money through merch or stadium events. Every club is going to be feeling the pinch and it just highlights our issues even more. 3) A disconnected owner. We don't know anything about him, he's owned us for 3 years and he's never said a thing. We never knew his intentions from the word go, we don't know what his plan is. The whole takeover has stunk from the moment it happened. We were told by KL that it was to aid us moving forward and provide us with additional investment. All it seems to have done is hamstrung us even more than we were already. The reality is that we need investment like plenty of clubs do. It's clear that our owner has no interest in us so we can discount him allowing us any scope to grow. So we just have to hope we keep our head above water, we have a manager who keeps performing miracles, and our scouting is top notch for when we have to replace the investible starters to raise funds. In our current guise, relegation isn't ever too far away. We've had a fun year in football terms, weirdly, but it all feels like it's all on a bit of a knife edge and always has.

Minimino straight in for me. Redmond on the bench. I reckon we have a strong chance that Bedernek will have his card recinded. KWP 'should' be back and maybe Romeu. The starting 11 may not look 'too' bad on Saturday, but you just worry what this has done to the confidence. It took us a good few weeks to get over that previous 9-0.