shurlock

Agree. People have a short memory of L1 and the championship. Clearly we’ll shed certain types of fans and good riddance; but OAPs and families? The thermos and brigade are a basic element of our support, reflecting the culture and demographics of the city and club. If anything, they form a larger proportion of our support that does midweek away games. I have nothing against them whatsoever.

Frankly many of those who had a good day out and will enjoy the memories are precisely the ones who have not been following the club up and down the country. I know many today who do and are not Disney fans, whatever that means and they did not have a good time and were at Wembley, largely going through the motions.

He actually made one of those covering challenges because Hoedt let the player (Willian?) go.

Three years ago around this time Les was doing cameos for Barry Gale.

Lots of faces from Itchen North in my block who’ve supported the club through thick and thin and are typically very vocal. Many weren’t up for the game today. Not your usual lads-old codgers split in terms of support (or lack of it).

Frankly it’s closer to three years poor recruitment; but I guess VVD easily makes up for the other iffy-disappointing signings.

There wasn’t a problem because we had players in both seasons who had demonstrated they could make a difference in the league and form the spine of a side -notwithstanding the disruption around it. 2014-15: Fonte, Clyne, Schneiderlin, Wanyama, Davis to name a few. 2015-16: Fonte, Wanyama, Mané, Pelle, Bertrand, Davis and Tadic. This season we have Bertrand and to some extent Romeu, though he’s been poor. The rest have too many red flags (Austin-injury), (Davis-age) and (Tadic-consistency) to be truly counted on. Perhaps the hope was that having underwhelmed in their first season, the likes of PEH, Boufal, Gabbi and Redmond would kick on in their second season; but that hasn’t happened and the result is that we’ve been left with the shell of a side, relative to previous seasons. I agree that recruitment has been poor. A related problem is that we’ve cut too close to the bone. We’ve recruited on the assumption that a new signing could pick up the slack left by the departing player and that they would largely be ‘hits’. That’s dangerous in its own right since many signings, no matter how good they look on paper, don’t work out. It’s particularly dangerous in our case as no individual signing could ever be expected to fill such big shoes as VVD and Mané.

A lot of bang average players you mean.

Agree it was odd to play Austin and Long when we sat so deep and Austin was miles from Long when we did try to release Long with his pace. It also didn’t help that our CBs and midfield treated the football like a hot potato in the first half. Neither Bednarek nor Hoedt was particularly comfortable playing out from the back and linking up with Cedric and Bertrand who were underused. Thought Lemina had a poor first half but grew into the game and ended it quite brightly.

Of course, selling so many players is an issue. Every player sold needs to be replaced and creates the risk that the replacement might be gash -never mind making it harder for the team to gel.

It’s crunch time and to think people were wetting themselves with laughter because teams like Swansea were picking up lucky wins against Liverpool.

close second

Nothing sweeter than seeing that little runt Lingard fouled.

#reedsrejects

You mean the Jack Cork who’d walk into our current team, if not be our best midfielder pal?

First team can also mean the full first team squad.

Other than the fact that Puel picked up more wins in the second half of last season than we’ve managed all this season, you’re spot on pal.

Glasgow still getting triggered by Puel

Massie is bats**t crazy - your typical tea partier, deep state conspiraloon.

Nice story balders. Show me a market timer and I'll show you a heap of pony.

Hardest position to play in our formation and it is his third game in ten or so days there.

Anyone with any football nous can see the players are not up to par (and to repeat one last time for the hard of understanding, these are not players who helped us finish 6th and 7th). I'd argue the poor recruitment goes back to 2015, especially as we no longer have VVD, though the last two seasons have been even worse. Do think that if Hughes had joined earlier, we would have enough to stay up. Am not a huge fan but there have definitely been signs of progress and learning. Having lost his first three league games, you can also understand the temptation last night to bank the one point and restore a bit of confidence. Had the momentum been with us second half or had it been a more even game, Hughes might have gambled; but as it was, we were gash after HT.

Looks like Les has been comfort eating or been on the complimentary Thai peanut chicken (one of the perks Les gets for masterminding Leicester’s league title).