Lighthouse

You mean apart from Nathan Jones who was about as ugly, route one and ‘old school’ as a manager could be?

He’s been captain of my fantasy team since week one, it’s finally starting to pay dividends.

People keep saying this. Why? It's not as if he has to stay with us for the rest of his life.

And yet they're currently looking at one point from their first four, same GD as Saints and six conceded against Chelsea. I'm not sure their forum will share your optimism.

I don't think owner make judgements on such short term, volatile outcomes. They will have spent the money they did hoping we can stay up, knowing that the odds are ultimately against us.

It wasn't for us as such but we always wondered why Pelle never took them for Saints, then he took one in a shootout for Italy and the penny dropped.

Roughly where do you think the players we had then and now belong in the PL?

The full picture is that it’s been happening since we sold Virgil and blew the lot on terrible players, which not only contributed very little on the pitch but crippled us financially for years. Coupled with an owner who did absolutely nothing whilst most of our rivals were investing in their squad and you can see our slow decline. We did have one shining light who managed to make the team far greater than the sum of its parts - Ralph. He kept us in the PL year after year with a team built around McCarthy, Bednarek, Stephens and other Galacticos such as Jan Valery, Charlie Austin and Shane Long. Bizarrely, some fans thought that regularly fighting relegation and finishing 15th was an underachievement with that squad and that he should be sacked. Eventually the new owners agreed and since the day Ralph left we’ve been nothing other than a PL basket case or at best a solid Championship playoff team.

Weird to think this is the same Gloucestershire team we pulled off our only really convincing win against in this year’s Blast.

The atmosphere in the Northam was only ever generated by the proximity of the away fans. Without them, it’s just the old Chapel with everyone standing up.

I’ve decided to just become a professional Everton laugher atter.

If Everton can lose from 2-0 up again, that’ll be hilarious.

TBH our games so far have gone the way I expected. There're very, very few players in our squad who I'd hang my hat on being PL quality and one of the was THB. I like the look of Suga, whilst Fernandes and Dibling look promising but are a long way from being proven. KWP and Ramsdale are solid but that's about it.

They’re crap, get over it.

That’s not the point. You mentioned three players who you claimed could change a game against Man United, despite the fact that they did nothing in the Championship.

I can’t help but think that he and Archer were signed as very good players to have in the Championship, in the likely event that we go straight back down.

Two of those players were crap in the Championship. The other apparently couldn’t secure a move to Turkey. A classic example of players becoming better when they not playing.

Why? Even if we go down, he’ll have plenty of opportunities to go to other PL clubs and play regular football.

What a silly, drama Queen statements. We very obviously can score at least one goal; it won’t be easy but we’ve played well enough generally to still have a chance of getting something, however unlikely.

That would have been special.

Likewise, but I can see why he’s done it. Our fourth game back up, THB hasn’t been playing well and we’ve gone back to a back four. I think he wanted more known experience in there to start with, THB will get more chances.

I love the idea that they told Brydon Carse, "okay, just go out and knock a nice easy single, so we win the game," and he was like, "I’ve got you bro!"

It’s all bluster and rhetoric. Rule one when dealing with Russia; do exactly what Putin strongly warns you against. They really don’t have many cards to play here when it comes to NATO, everyone knows they’re bluffing. Politicians are just wary of saying it out loud because it’ll whip up hysteria and panic amongst thick people who think they might actually launch nukes.

I believe Estonia has exactly the same tune, possibly with different words, I can’t quite remember. Needless to say, they’ve yet to win an F1 race.

He seriously underachieved here with the resources he had available and ended up leaving us in basically the same position as when we joined. Obviously it goes without saying that we all wish him well in his battle with the big C, however.