Window Cleaner

That's partly down to D'Agostino as well though. Mauricio obviously knows what he wants from players but it's down to the whole coaching team to make sure that they improve as required. Manager always gets all the praise and all the crap if there's any going round but it really is a group effort. Don't even know who our first team coach is right now.

Didn't say more, said better. To me we have far too many average players and not enough quality. When a player is replaced by another it needs to be one of the same sort of quality. When you replace Davis with JWP you have a relative cliff edge in quality. We have one team that's good enough but when we can't use it we drop off and then the rot sets in. A few weeks back we were 7th in the League and still in the League Cup, you just can't envisage keeping up that sort of rythm when your fringe group of players is so far below the level of your first team. There is no point in keeping endless hangers on around to sap your funds, loan them out, give them away but stop paying them.

Squad is far too light on quality to envisage a season with a current minimum of 51 games. Could even go to 55+ if we stay in the FA Cup. That's a Chelsea or Arsenal type season and look at the squad depth they have.

Yes when you consider Forster's reaction speed to some of those shown by De Gea and Mignolet yesterday afternoon it's certainly not in his favour. Just seems to be off form just now. When you consider how he saved us time and time again against Arsenal a year or so back there's a world of difference. Then again we had a fit alternatve at that time.

Who knows,ask her.

the "board" as you call it doesn't have the money to invest as our accounts are pretty balanced. The owner is the one who could, in theory, invest but she doesn't want to, Ralph told us that 18 months or so ago.

Probably scores in training by doing that, Forster having taken a huge lunge to one side or the other.

So basically any free kick artist who can get the ball to just brush off one of his own players in the wall can score without problem against Forster. Thought that the bounce and rebound undid Forster myself and the step to his right really didn't help. Now if Barton had swung it into the top corner Forster would probably have made a miracle save, juyst doesn't seem to get down quickly at all the days.

Which they didn't. Saints played reasonably well, they don't take the chances they create that's all.

Spelt wrongly but I don't doubt he means the pessimistic undertaker in Dad's Army. John Laurie

What... all we're doing is evening up the trade deficit ever so slightly, they sell us plastic crap, we sell them over the hill footballers.

Don't know about the final ball, the finishing was woeful though. We should have scored at least 3 and that's without the great saves that Heaton made. Tadic drags it wide twice, Virgil heads straight at the keeper etc

A tale of 2 keepers....

Dirty, violent and corrupt....you can see why anyone could mistake the two.

Not at all bad, solid defensively, incisive attacking.

Barry is an OK player, his trouble is that his type of football no longer suits the asanitised rule book. He gets shedloads of cards for tackles, which 10 years ago were pretty standard. Morgan used to get his fair share of cards with us as well and was probably told by Van Gaal to clean it up a bit. Don't know if any of you watched Utd games last year but there was a lot of bite missing in Morgan's tackling. Van Gaal turned him into a powder puff tackler and ruined what he bought.

Same as the other 30 odd months he's been here then.:rolleyes:

India isn't a football nation as would testify their 135 th ranking on the FIFA scale. Plus in their zone the concurrence is far greater than it is in the CONCAF where Canada ply their trade.

Probably a few people in Africa and Asia, plus the odd Banana Republic... places where being bent as a nine bob note is pretty standard.

Don't FIFA give them money for participating then?

Well as the 2026 WC seems to be a certainty for the old US of A I'd guess they'll put that forward as one of the reasons for giving the competion to them. That makes it even worse because if the plan goes ahead as foreseen the Concaf will have 8 or 9 teams in those finals. They're obviously trying to assure that current footballing non-entities like China and Canada are present solely for the TV and advertising revenues that would be generated. South America would also go to 7 teams under the proposed scheme, meaning that their qualifiers would be about as meaningful as a series of friendlies. It's all about the money and nothing else.

L'Equipe used to be straight from the stable sports news. Of late they've realised that there are papers, subscriptions and advertising to be sold with peddling garbage they've picked up from the Sun,the Star and their ilk. One step above the Star when it comes to EPL "news" nowadays.

Won't make any difference to crap like Scotland though, Europe will probably go from 13 to 16 places, meaning that those who lost in the play-offs would be the sort of team to benefit from that.

The asking price for Sakho will be somewhere around **20 million £, probably negociable slightly but as they love our hard ball negociating tactic when we'ere selling them players I think we can rule out anything less than about 18 million to us. **It's in L'Equipe by the way.

Penalty shoot outs in the last round of games is mooted. I notice that the really big beneficiaries of this increase in teams is the Concaf (US and Central America) who are predicted to go from 3.5 qualifiers to 6.5 qualifiers, an increase of almost 100% whereas Europe will only go from 13 to 16, that being only about 23%. I mean take away the USA, Mexico and Costa Rica and what have you left in the Concaf really? Perhaps they're planning for California's eventual secession.