S-Clarke

I can't help but feel sorry for him on a personal level as well, but taking that out of it I think the club do need to be a bit ruthless with him in the summer - just so we can move on not have him taking up wage and squad space. 2 weeks becomes 4 weeks, which becomes months for Ross - it's terrible for him, but we need to be realistic with him as well (so do the doctors around him). He's barley kicked a ball for 3 years, there is no feasible way he returns to the top level to be able to contribute in any meaningful way - his body will have lost all the conditioning and he'll always be susceptible. I genuinely think for his sake he should retire and focus on a life beyond playing football, it'll be better for his mind I'm sure. Similar has to be said of Larios too - he's a bit of a worse case because he's so, so slight in himself anyway. I just don't see how his body will ever be able to sustain professional football.

We haven't even had the ability to sort succession planning for our better players because we keep chopping and changing our managers and then in turn - our style. We totally under appreciated Romeu's role as a club and blindly went into that season with a gaping hole which he used to occupy. Clubs will have peaks and troughs when it comes to recruitment success, but to still be as bad over 8 years is pretty scathing and that alone should be a reason to scrap whatever department we have and start again - but it's imperative that the strategy aligns with clarity from the top down, otherwise it will just continue to be a disjointed mess.

The recruitment certainly has to take it's fair share of blame in terms of where we are, this is not just a 2 year thing either - we've been signing crap for many years now. Of course there will be the odd exception here and there, Fernandes, Tino, Lavia etc and you'll find certain players thrive better at other clubs. I'm still not entirely sure what the club saw in the likes of AMN, Diallo, Moussa, Hoedt, Armstrong, Ely, Aribo, Perraud, Stewart, Larios, Bazunu etc to suggest they'd be any good physically at the top level. That has been the big let down with our worst signings in my opinion and there have been a lot of them. I'd also add that our confused philosophy will screw things, we're buying players suited to one approach and then changing tact and playing a different way with players who aren't physically capable. The club need to decide on an approach and recruit for that approach, we can't keep chopping and changing like we have as we'll end up with a squad full of dribs and drabs and no real consistent theme (as we see today).

They did replace them with quality though (Some bought, some returning from loans), Solomon, Tanaka, Ramazini, Aaaronson, Rodon, Struijk etc are all top tier players for that level. Add that to the likes of James, Gnonto, Ampadu, Firpo, Gruev, Piroe who were already there. Pretty formidable outfit really, with a bit more balance this year to my eyes.

I'm surprised there's nothing about how to waste £80m.

There is a rumour going around that I heard at the game, seems as others heard the same - but Fitzhugh rebutted that and claimed he has been at the training ground and is genuinely 100% injured. We'll see I guess.

It would have been an odd signing last season, so it was even more of an odd one this year. He's a pretty low-end Championship CB, but this is the problem we lumbered ourselves with in the summer - no proper DoF, so these sorts of things were driven by Martin which shouldn't have happened. He signed a decent sized contract too, so he'll be around next year.

Out of interest, who are his two sidekicks? I haven't seen anything about staff he has brought with him. The rest of this season is going to be odd, nothing really matters and there's nothing to build on because we'll be stripped back come the summer. We're in a weird holding position and none of us really know what is going on. Juric is pretty much just a caretaker at this point. I also see Rohl as a logical shout come the summer, but SR don't do logical shouts!

I wouldn't say we just scraped into the playoffs, that's re-writing history a bit. It was a breakaway 4 really, Leicester, Ipswich ourselves and Leeds. There are players in amongst the group today who impacted at that level, some heavily. I do agree that there needs to be a bit of a clear-out though, as we've managed to accrue such a large squad of fundamentally lower league players. But I don't think it's fair to proclaim we only scraped the playoffs, I think we finished 17 points clear of 7th.

''Possession without substance'' or ''We don't just buy failures, we breed it''

There are only 13 more games to play.

I agree, but for me this is the last throw of the dice I give them. They've flip flopped so many times, this new direction simply has to be something that gives us a foundation to work from. I worry for next season because the hangover will be huge, we will likely have to overcome a very tricky first 6 months, but I'd hope that we'd start seeing changes in things and longer-term plans by Christmas that we can unite behind. At the moment there is nothing other than fluff pieces. Their plan is almost as non-existent as Gao's 5 pledges at the moment, so we need to see something now.

Starting Aribo and Smallbone was an utter WTF call for sure, but I do look at the state of it here and wonder what on earth he can do with this horrendous bunch of 'footballers'? He's struggling to find the right sorts to play the way he wants. My only criticism at this point is that we've got another manager who only knows how to play one way, rather than a manger who is flexible enough to work with what he's got. He's not going to get 'heavy metal' out of a squad full of crab footballers, so he's lost before he's even started. Apparently, this is just a rumour, THB is not 'injured' - it's another case of the Downes. We'll see if he's back next week. Juric has got a hell of a lot on his plate really, I can't think of a worse club in the 92 to manage in the current situation. There's no hope.

I find it depressing when people use the ''we got a profit'' ''he allowed us to buy x'' lines to try and justify a sale, it's a truly depressing way to think about anything. We shouldn't give a shit about money, finances. All we should care about is having the best players on the pitch and watching a game that's enjoyable, which is what we pay for at the end of the day. I don't pay money to watch us to then get a hard on about how much we sell player x for. Charly was grossly misused under Martin, very much the same way as Charles. He was too much of a maverick for Martin which says more about him than it does Charly.

It's getting to the point where one of us lot should step into the dugout and inject a bit of common sense into proceedings. Why would anyone start a midfield two of Aribo and Smallbone? What on earth do you see in them, attribute wise, to come to the conclusion that they can be of any use in midfield at this level? (heck, even the Championship as a pair). It was no surprise we looked better in the 2nd half when we had a midfield, a bit of a cliché but it is the the engine room - it's where everything goes right or wrong, if you start the game without a midfield it's just a case of the defenders playing damage limitation - and when you start with Wood and Bednarek as your defenders, you can't even play damage limitation. This has been the most soul destroying season I couldn't even have imaged in August, we play every game like a lower league underdog going up against a big boy - we have a little spell in the match, but overall are no where near good enough and end up losing. At this stage we are not even a top half Championship side. What we take away from today is that Bournemouth are absolutley light years ahead of us on the pitch, as we knew would be the case. How our ownership have allowed that to happen - with their fanbase and infrastructure - is frankly unacceptable and they have no more leeway, get it wrong next season and it's game over for them and their ownership game with us - and as a fan base we've got to be very, very vocal about it.

I know what you mean, but I think peoples opinions are a little skewed by the Tella situation. There will be the odd occasion when that happens, but I think generally when a PL club loans out players and they do well at a lower level, it's to the benefit of the then PL club rather than anyone else. I can't imagine a situation where Edwards isn't starting for us next season, he's got a big contract and the loan has been perfect for him this year - the situation where it benefits ourselves, QPR and the player.

The only chink of light that I can cling onto is that fortunes in football can change so, so quickly (when you're not a 'big' club). It can go sour for Bournemouth as quickly as it could turn good for us, although at the moment it looks slim pickings!

Yep, very true. Our CB recruitment is leading the way in crapness. Only we can go from Fonte and VVD to Yoshida and Stephens less than a year later. The Southampton Way of doing things differently I guess.

Yeah he has, but if you go back to 2018/2019 the most consistent factor with our awful defence has been Bednarek. Bar a couple of purple patches here and there, he's been involved in it all. Both 9-0's, the 5-0's, 6-0's etc. +60 goals conceded in every season he's been a consistent part of it, I include last season in that as well. He's definitely redeemed himself professionally since his stomp off to Villa, but he is one of the reasons we leak goals as he's so incredibly limited.

Such an awful goalkeeper. No idea why coaches talk him up so much, there aren't many worse which the stats back up.

He has form for this, it's how he got his move from Ipswich to Swansea originally. That's why he was booed by Ipswich when we played them, he left a sour taste. It's a shame that it will end like this as he was excellent for us last year, but he'll certainly never play for us again imo.

When fans are so, so negative about their team after a poor run of form, it's surprising how often the game turns out to be decent and they get a result. On this occasion though? No chance. We're just not at the level to compete with teams like Bournemouth anymore, it's not poor form it's just a poor team. The fact that Bournemouth are now levels above us should send SR's heads spinning, as they've let this happen.

People are in danger of following the generic ''Player to leave script'', which entails entirely downgrading their past performances and impact for us and making them out to have always been poor. Happens all the time. He has been poor this season, no question, but last season he was our best player. The best CM in the league IMO. You can't really start to call last season decent, or underwhelming, he was excellent. I still stand by the fact that he 'could' be good at PL level, only if he has the right players around him. You can't expect him to do a number 6 job on his own at this level. If you put him alongside a Romeu type then I think we'd have different opinions on him from this year. He's let himself down for sure, and has been the one player who has disappointed me the most this year. He hasn't particularly earned the right to stomp his feet after his showings this year, but let's not discredit his efforts last year.

It was well documented at the time that RM was a big part of the recruitment process in the summer, leading it in some aspects in light of no DoF. Of course recruitment is a club-wide debate, but RM had a hell of a lot of influence over our picks in the summer (Wood and Fraser as two examples). I don't think he appreciated the step up and seemed comfortable continuing with the same spine from the previous season, with the likes of BBD/Wood thrown in for good measure. If Juric was here in the summer I'm fairly certain we'd have seen a lot more physicality come into the door. Our recruitment team entirely underestimated that requirement in the summer, the power and pace teams have at this level is now ridiculous.

He is the one who built a squad so ill-prepared for top flight football, he thought it was a good idea to spend resources on the likes of BBD, Wood, Fraser, Archer etc. So it's on him. I wouldn't say the style got us promoted last season, it was the level of quality relative to that level which dug us out of lots of holes - those holes were created by the style and farting around. As we've gone up a level, the quality in our squad has dropped (which is a really poor indicment of the recruitment) - but he still persisted on playing the same style but without the required quality level to dig us out of the holes it continuously stuck us in.