HarvSFC

Norwich fans are delighted at winning the league every other season.

League One is looking exciting before its final day tomorrow. Title still up for grabs between Wigan, Rotherham and MK Dons. Sheffield Wednesday, Sunderland, Plymouth and Wycombe all separated by two points from 4th to 7th. Then at the other end, only Crewe have been confirmed as relegated with Doncaster, Wimbledon, Gillingham, Fleetwood and Morecambe all fighting to stay up. And Portsmouth competing for 8th.

On the topic of Baird, he's a scout at the club now, if you didn't know. As for POTS. A toss up between the WPs. JWP being the top scorer from a deep central midfield position is obviously impressive and his world class free-kicks saving us on occasion. Only criticism would be that our midfield has been overrun at times, but I think that's sometimes down to the tactics, leaving the central midfield vulnerable and outnumbered. Whereas, I can't remember KWP having a bad game this season. His form has remained at a good level throughout the good run and our current bad run. Either one are deserved and clear winners for this season.

I don’t think Bertrand or Vestergaard will be too positive about their moves to Leicester, either. Earning more money, but they’ve both had nightmares. Probably more down to their now in Bertrand’s case limited skill set, but they won’t see it that way.

Only has two more England caps and Johnstone isn't a regular on the West Brom bench at the moment at 13th in the Championship West Brom. McCarthy also has 102 more Premier League appearances in his career, despite only being separated by three years. McCarthy has also never been relegated from the Premier League and was named our player of the season when we almost went down, so he's topped Johnstone in that regard also. The debates we have about McCarthy and Forster are the same debates West Brom fans are having about Johnstone, only, again they're playing at a level below us. http://westbrom.com/forum/index.php?topic=21946.4175 Aston Villa fans were the same when they re-signed him too: https://www.villatalk.com/topic/15997-sam-johnstone/page/71/ We need a new goalkeeper, all is agreed. But, I and many others can see that Johnstone is not the answer. He might save us some points, like Forster did against Arsenal, but he'll cost us a shit load too, like McCarthy and Forster do. It would be very lazy from the recruitment team if they picked up Johnstone. We don't need to keep going down the English route, our best goalkeepers of recent years have been foreign and so are the best goalkeepers in the Premier League.

I think Nat Phillips’ name has come up on here over the last year, Bournemouth fans really don’t like him.

City go from comfortable to on the edge and bringing Fernandinho on before half time. Good old football.

There have been 12 bookings for simulation in total in the Premier League this season. Everton are responsible for six of those bookings...

Johnson's contract runs out next summer, it was one of the decisions Forest were reportedly making in January in that whether to sell him and get a good price, but risk their play-off push, or keep him for the play-off push, but lose him for a smaller fee in the future.

Everton’s January transfer business… Mykolenko for £17m. He starts, that’s about as positive as it gets for Everton based on the names coming up, but Digne he is not. Patterson £12m, signed for the future, but they need the now, made one appearance. El-Ghazi, not good enough for Villa, not good enough for Everton, lucky to make the bench, made two appearances. Dele Alli, a shadow of the player he once was and we dodged a bullet if we were truly in for him. Sometimes form isn’t always temporary and he’s become a bench player for a relegation battling side. Van De Beek, hasn’t done anything since the move other than pick up an injury, another who possibly isn’t suited to this league. They sure are poor at transfer windows.

I was beginning to think we’d never see Sarmiento.

Essentially, we need a summer of 2014-15, which saw us bring in Tadic, Pelle, Forster, Long, Gardos, Mane, Bertrand, Alderweireld and...Taider. Only thing is, is that we brought in approximately £100m from player outgoings. Can't see the same happening this summer.

Noticed his name in an article regarding a coaching qualification: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/61162356 Can only be a positive.

We were. Whenever I've seen Arsenal he's been the weak link. I remember him getting subbed off tactically after 35 minutes against Nottingham Forest in the cup because he wasn't up to it against a Championship side. Same as Firpo at Leeds, Perraud was the best of the bunch that we were linked with last summer.

I don't care who we sell in the summer, this team's too inconsistent and more consistently crap, than good. Even favourites like Stuart Armstrong and Romeu, who've had good moments and good seasons are showing now that they can't consistently perform in the Premier League anymore and have been poor for well over a month and have been crap for near seven consecutive matches now. We need the Palace reboot under the new owners and hopefully they've got the financial flexibility to give us that, so that it's not a sell one and replace with three from the bargain basement such as last summer was. Only players who haven't dropped off over this period are KWP and Forster. Onto Brighton, yay.

Going to be a painful evening for Ollie Lancashire going by the club's line-up Tweet.

To be fair, Howe took charge of Newcastle on November 8th. He got one win in his first nine matches in charge with his second and third wins coming on 22nd January and 8th February. Their signings obviously did make an impact and to be fair they did sign well in hindsight, as I doubted a few of them at the time in my want for Newcastle to fail. Even Targett's playing well there, although, again like when he had Grealish in front of him, he now has Saint-Maximin, so his job is slightly simpler in that he doesn't need to get up and down the pitch. They're deploying the "dark arts" well now and to be fair they now have a "never say die" attitude, which showed in their match against Leicester at the weekend. I didn't see last night's. We were in a very similar position when Hasenhuttl first joined. One win in 16 league games, in 19th place, a very unfit squad with Hughes' poor training regime. We beat Arsenal in Hasenhuttl's second game, which is becoming a bit of a habit and Huddersfield in his third. No January signings and we finished 16th. Yet, some won't credit that, as they do other sides... 🤷‍♂️

How did Bielsa and Rangnick get their mythical reputations?

Like ours against Chelsea, the Manchester United players are just walking around when not in possession, while Liverpool pass it around them at ease. Always find it bizarre as at their simplest they are still professional athletes, so you'd expect them to be able to break into a jog at the very least. And this is supposed to be a major rivalry.

Happy Portsmouth will have to spend another season in League One day everybody. A 93rd minute Morecambe equaliser to confirm their status.

Based on his time here and against our other right-backs of the Premier League era, I'd rate him fourth: KWP - Clyne - Livramento - Cedric - Chambers - Martina - Pied And there were occasions during Cedric's time here under Koeman when he was benched for Martina. Overall, he did a solid, yet unspectacular job here and Saturday showed that he certainly isn't good enough for Arsenal, as he can't hit a cross for love nor money. Then there were the back post incidents here due to his height... So, he had faults both going forward and defensively during his Southampton career. It was a case of he's doing a job, but we could certainly do better.

Why's it not being played after the season? There isn't a summer tournament that it could clash with, as with the Euros last year.

I might be making this up, but weren't reports at the time of the new McCarthy deal suggesting that they had been offered deals on "second choice terms", hence why Forster turned down the offer. There's no doubting that Forster's the better of the two now, and I was a long-term McCarthy supporter, as he was doing the simple things right, while for a very long period Forster simply wasn't. I remember when simple catches from him were being sarcastically cheered in the stadium and any shot from range and on target seemingly went in. However, he now seems to be the player we originally signed, before the injury and before the new contract. But, that in itself then brings a new element of risk with any new contract. For many years now, we've been hoping for a team to sign Forster, but that simply hasn't happened, as no other club could afford to take him on/match what we were paying. That left us with a large outlay of our wage budget going on a player that wasn't in the matchday squad for a large percentage of their contract and a major player within the "unsellables". So, yes, Forster was incredible today and for years I've been saying we need a goalkeeper who we can come away from a match saying "fucking hell, how did we win that?" and Forster was that goalkeeper today. However, next week he could drop a clanger, as he did against Leeds two weeks ago. That's Forster now and in order to progress with the goalkeeper position we need someone more consistent and again given his history, there's no telling that if we did offer him a new contract with a promise of him being our number one, that his form doesn't fall off a cliff again, hamstringing us in the market again. It's too risky for a club with our budget. A good servant for the club, eight years, but at 34 now, I think his best option would be to take up the Scott Carson/Lee Grant/Andy Lonergan role at a big club as their homegrown quota, or I could see a return to Newcastle as their number two, where he will be paid a lot more handsomely than he would be as our number two here.

Super Fraser Forster. Won us the points today with his heroics. Great reaction from last week, we actually fought for it today. Cedric really does have the second best agent in football behind Choupo-Moting. Poor scouting brought him to us, how he then played for Inter and ended up at Arsenal, lord only knows.

Perhaps confirms Salisu will be off in the summer? He’s been bad, Bednarek’s been bad, either could have been dropped, so interesting that he’s gone with Salisu. Hopefully Valery and Lyanco have good games, certainly could do against Nketiah.