S-Clarke

You're right, I was having a maths brain fuck as usual. We wouldn't be equal with everyone until after we've played our game in hand against them though, we'll only have 2 games left after that - that's what I was clumsily trying to get to.

They have a game in hand too, against us.

Ah didn't realise they'd dropped him, that'll please their fans. He's a decent young keeper to be fair, but similar to what we did to Bazunu we just threw him into the lions den too soon.

Just to put some context on it, 'if' Norwich were to beat Leicester and we won our two games in hand (including against Leicester) we would still be 2 points behind them with a far inferior goal difference and just 2 games to play.

Norwich scream Play off winners to me. They were nowhere near at Christmas, but haven't stopped winning since. So much momentum at this stage which is hard to stop, I saw them as a challenger for the Top 2 at the start so once they've got their shit together they are pretty formidable.

Great story for him, he's definitely played a part this year - albeit somewhat bit part, but he's fully integrated into their squad and has contributed some big moments. I'm so glad he ended up there than fucking Burnley.

Burnley are an interesting comparison for sure. Kompany as their manager would have brought a Man City-lite approach with him, i.e their pass, pass pass last season in the Champ. They used this summer to hoover up talented young players from around Europe, including rather oddly....another £15m young keeper from Man City, who their fans don't rate but has kept his place no matter what. Some interesting parallels for sure. They've spent a lot of money, £130m ish, but are too inexperienced and the style they are trying to implement in the PL has left them too exposed. And this is a team who stormed to 105 points last year.

Anyone see the stupid Lallana pre-match interview today? He was on the bench for Brighton, but was talking about how good it was to ''be back home'', it's like 'I've never been away''. ''I'm desperate for Liverpool to win the league'' Brighton fans didn't take too kindly to it, but this is Lallana all over - self indulged and a bit of a wet wally it has to be said.

Let's not forget we've got 19 goal Adam Armstrong in attack for us, Ipswich don't have an out and out prolific forward - neither do Leicester or Leeds, it's not about that in my opinion. We always score goals, but when you look back at some of our wins or defeats (4-3, 3-2, 4-2, 1-4, 0-5 etc) we give up way too much in most games, so we put ourselves in a position where we constantly unrealistically need to hit more than 2 goals a game to have a shot of winning. That's what's done us in my opinion, scoring and chance creation wise we don't have a problem. We just give up way, way, way too much against everyone we play - not so much individual limitations, more so the aggressive tactical approach and how often we get countered on. We concede opportunities to the lesser sides, but they're not as good defensively to repel us in attack so we can get those 2+ goals we need to ultimately win and no one has a problem. Against the better sides though it's not realistic to expect to have a chance of winning if we're giving them 2 or 3 free goals in the game.

That game summed up the PL this year imo - the quality level bar this year is very, very low. I'm sure we had Sky Sports say ''this is why the PL is the best league in the world' at one point or another though.

This is a point I made the other day, the 'games in hand' - I hate them at this stage of the season, horrendous. Give me the points on the board now, the games in hand are shit. All it does is create a false illusion ''oh if we win those two games look at where we'll be'' - without them we're absolutely miles behind. My mind was dragged into that false illusion as well, but I've totally come to the conclusion that games in hand at this stage of the season are nothing more than a huge disadvantage.

Not at all, always one of the more positives on here - but I think there comes a point where you just need to be realistic. No point in wasting energy in hoping for the impossible, sure if we were closer then it would be pretty exciting - but we're 10 points behind with 9 games to go, it's the biggest of tall orders - it took us a 26 game unbeaten run to overhaul their last 10 point lead. Time to focus on the Play offs.

The Kalvin Philips sub killed them. He should never have left his Leeds comfort blanket, no where near good enough for anyone else.

Always been the case though isn't it, whenever they go to the screen it's a done deal. They've got people rabbiting on in their ears influencing their opinion.

As fans we complain about the shoe-horning players, square pegs etc yet suggest stuff like this. Aribo is not a striker, he is a number 10 at most in an attacking sense. We tried to play him as a striker during pre-season when he first signed for us, epic fail there. Being 'tall and strong' should not be the single prerequisite for playing up front.

One of the worst quality seasons in many years imo. Everton and Forest have both been deducted points, and both will still probably survive without breaking sweat.

Add him to the list of atrocious and unceccecary signings over the last so many windows. We really need to sort our shit out as these mistakes aren't going to be recoverable from without PL money. Our recruitment is bordering on criminal negligence. We even spent £10m at this level on an injured striker in August when we needed a striker, and he's still injured.

No chance that game will mean anything. Will be a dead rubber with everything decided before that. Leicester and Ipswich battling it out for 2nd may go down to the wire, but Leeds will have it wrapped up imo.

Cov's scouting in recent years has been absolutely faultless. Hamer, Gyökeres, Wright, Simms, Van Ewijk (someone I'd look to as a replacement for KWP), O'Hare, Sheaf etc. Absolutely epic recruitment. We can learn a lot from them.

But there's no point in looking at the games they'll drop points in if we also drop points on the same gameday. No one had Leicester and Leeds to drop points yesterday, so potentially we had some bonus ground to make up - but we fucked it and that is that. They'll probably drop a few points here and there in the run in, but inevitably so will we as we proved yesterday. We simply have too much to do, realistically we needed to win all 10 games and we've already failed at the first hurdle on that one. We can only get 100 points now I think, and the Top 2 are already on course to both hit 100+ points. It'll be interesting watching from afar to see how Leicester can recover though, how they've made that into a 3 horse race is beyond me.

They're top league professional footballers, if they let a little bit of crowd distraction throw them off course and lead them to forget how to defend then they shouldn't be playing football at this level. Not sure I buy it, as we had no control of that game in the 2nd half at all - even before all the stand stuff.

When the teams above us drop points we need to maximise how we capitalise, because we're already 10 points away from them and only have 9 games left - so gaining just 1 point is a mega fail. It's going to be near on impossible to get anywhere near the Top 2 now, this is why I hate games in hand because they create this weird limbo/illusion land where people assume we'll win the games in hand etc, then look where we'll be. I've been guilty of being drawn into that. The fact is as of this morning we are 8 points off of 3rd, 9 points off of 2nd, 10 points off of 1st. We have 9 games to go. It's not going to happen. We're finishing 4th. I've been looking forward to the final 10 games but it honestly feels like it's over before it even begun.

More frustration than anything for me, a case of 'what could have been' - these sides will wobble but not much....and when they do we need to avoid doing the same, otherwise nothing changes. But today we also slipped up so whatever they've done is pretty irrelevant really.

Not really sure I'd feel anything other than fucking frustration if we end today with both Leeds and Leicester losing their games.

Still waiting for those 5 Pledges.