stknowle

Hmmm, you might be onto something here. Why bother with Association Football when the far more entertaining American version is available? I should imagine the Premiership will be defunct within 10 years after enough people have realised.

Thought the same but replay from behind Redmond looked like it was sneaking in.

Excellent goal. Hattrick now please Redmond.

He's looked perfectly fine for a young player making his debut. 1 bad mistake aside.

Made 1 bad mistake but otherwise yes.

Yes and Tom O'Connor is a 'comedian'

W@nker Lovren at fault as well!

Excellent effort, organisation and concentration throughout. Yoshida brilliant, will miss him just as he’s coming into a run of form. We need some out and out jet heeled pace in our attack to stand a realistic chance of scoring in games like that.

Yeah, credit where it’s due he’s doing very well tonight.

NO.

He's ****. Most notable things I can remember him doing were hitting the bar at Palace when he should have scored and failing to play the simplest of square balls to an unmarked Austin in front of an empty goal for a certain goal against (i think) Newcastle.

We did, apart from the first five minutes I thought we were second best, never really troubled them, never found any space, gave the ball away a lot, and lost out in most 50/50's. Le Tissier was saying pre-match how he had watched us training in the week and never seen that level of intensity in training before. I think it may have caught up with us.

Rice does look good.

Just watched first 2 episodes and was immediately struck by this.

Don't agree with that. Still plenty of work to do but we certainly do not look poor.

Get in. New goalscorer as well.

Attacking bench that!

Lee Todd?

Ok mate.

Adrian, we improved under Hughes - admittedly from an incredibly low starting point - and I said almost immediately. Do you think we got worse or better last season after Hughes took over from Pellegrino?

Happy to report not just lucky at all. Played really well, probably the best we've played since the cup final. Being a negative ****er I would still just point out that Arsenal fielded a defence decimated by injuries AND we did improve almost immediately under Hughes, losing to today's opponents by the same margin we won by today in a similarly even match. And look how that all turned out.......................... (PS - gut feeling is Ralph will turn out to be 10 times the manager Hughes has ever been or ever will be)

Bednarek very good as well.

......

With the ever increasing disparity between top and bottom I expect 30 to become the new benchmark for staying up over the next few seasons.

Highly unlikely that we do need to win that many. Absolutely certain that we won't. 7 (as last season) or 8 in total will probably be enough to scrape our sorry arses into another season in this league. That still equates to a spectacular turnaround in form. Over to you Ralph.