Lighthouse

Sheafs original point was that if we continue to be as poor as we’ve been, get relegated and keep Martin that we’re going to struggle next season because of a hangover. That’s not necessarily the case as The Blades are currently showing. Nothing is guaranteed but I’d say Russ is as likely to take us up as anyone else. Wilder was the manager for the latter 2/3 of last season, they were absolutely dreadful and went down with the awful form that I posted above. The kept Wilder, now they’re top of the Championship. What happened under Heckingbottom prior to that isn’t relevant.

Chris Wilder is just coming up on his first anniversary there, these are his results from the second half of last season.

It’s an argument for a very poor PL season having little bearing on next year in the championship. Last year Sheff Utd were abysmal, well adrift on 16 points, right now they’re top of the Championship. The best of the three promoted sides was Luton, who are now 17th.

Taylor is a LB we signed on a free from relegated Burnley. He may well have tons of PL experience but so does Jack Stephens. TP has never scored a goal in England, he held the ball up well on Sunday but if we’re holding him up as an avatar of our squads ability we are in trouble. Fernandes looks decent, THB is steadily improving, Downes looks generally alright but has had two absolute clangers leading to goals so far. Ramsdale, Fernandes and KWP are solid PL players. Not world beaters and when we go down they’ll probably be looking at West Ham and Fulham, rather than City and Liverpool, but they’re decent for a club like us. THB and Dibling will probably go to bigger clubs because of their age and potential. In short, you’re going to need more than five players (one of whom is an 18 year old and needs to be carefully managed) who are good enough to play in the PL in order to stay in it. If we can’t recruit better than that in two years time, hypothetically, then we’ll go straight back down again regardless of who’s at the helm.

Martin got us promoted last time, Fraser was a solid Championship option and BBD has averaged 15 goals across his last three Championship seasons, roughly watch Che managed last time. We’re jumping about ten steps ahead here. Let’s actually see if we do get promoted again first, then try and sign some decent PL players for a change, then see how Martin gets on with them.

We've got 4 points from 12 games. Last season we got promoted off the back of 3 points from our final 12 PL games. If we keep a reasonable chunk of the massive Championship squad we've assembled and the manager who took us up last time, there's no reason we can't get promoted again. What 'it'll be like' in August is a new season against far weaker opposition. If we've still got Martin, BBD, Archer, Armstrong, Bednarek, Fraser and co. we should hit the ground running.

Cool story. Let me know when he does.

Why is this season relevant but not last season, if we’re talking about the Championship? It won’t be another season of ‘this garbage’, we’ll be playing teams like Stoke and Millwall instead of Brighton and Liverpool. Russ and the players who are likely to stay next season are more than capable of another promotion.

I don't remember prime Maradona's first touch taking the ball about 7 yards in the wrong direction but okay.

You have no idea what’s going on with ABK. Gardening leave is very little different in real world terms, you’ll still have to pay the rest of his contract not to be our manager. They can do it, it’s just whether or not we have someone else lined up who’s worth the cost.

Gordon Bennett, let’s keep some attachment to reality shall we. Russ’ contract will stipulate which duties he is responsible for and what authority he has. You can’t just reassign him to being the tea lady and say, "do as you’re told!" No self respecting manager in the world is going to come in and work as a ‘manager above’ our current manager in that kind of bullsh*t set up. If we did try something like that, no half decent manager would touch us with a ten foot pole for years afterwards, knowing that’s how they’d be treated. If the club wants rid of Russ, they have to sack him and pay him compensation accordingly.

Mid table?! We have comfortably one of the bottom three, if not the worst, squads in the league.

Playing as a central striker at a Championship level is undoubtedly where BBD plays best. He’ll score goals there if we go down, as will Archer, with Armstrong on the right. We’ve got plenty of Championship standard firepower on the books already. Im not sure why we’d only want our money back on Downes. We don’t want to sell him and he’ll have a year of PL on when we first bought him. I don’t see why we’d want to sell him unless we were getting a substantial profit.

I’m not sure Downes has done enough to have PL battering down the door for him. Our Adams replacements will be BBD and Archer, so I’d argue we’re already stronger in that department. Suga will probably be decent in a team I’d expect to be attacking more often than not. His clangers will probably not get punished quite so ruthlessly as they are now.

I am so sorry for Alex McCarthy that being asked to play basic underarm passes out to a teammate twenty yards away is so far beyond his apparent abilities. I thought perhaps a PL keeper might be capable of that but clearly not. However you try and dress it up though, last time we went down he was conceding three and four every game, against much worse teams than the one we played yesterday. If he just boots it up the field all the time, perhaps we concede four or five yesterday, who knows.

I don’t care how Russ asked him to play, a professional goalkeeper shouldn’t be doing that. He's clearly defending his players in the media, which I admire but it’s not necessarily the whole truth. McCarthy is very clearly Martin’s third choice keeper when everyone is fit, that’s how highly he actually rates him. I thought everything Martin said in interviews was absolute nonsense and we didn’t listen to it. I am gobsmacked that anyone who watches football would blame Bazunu for the goals we conceded against Ipswich last year but NOT blame McC for the first goal yesterday.

I would expect to lose those players, possibly with the exception of Downes, and hopefully add Lallana, ABK and Sully. With Les and Max’s loans finishing it actually leaves us with a decent Championship squad in terms of size and quality, without having to make any signings, which may be something of a relief.

Yes, correct. I know that pass shouldn’t have been made, so do you, so does every fan in the stadium. So don’t you think it’s reasonable for our manager to expect a PL goalkeeper not to make it? Maybe take a breather for a few seconds and look for a better pass?

I’m sorry but at some point you have to be able ask Premier League footballers to do the absolute bare minimum basics correctly. We’re not asking him to stick a 70 yard diagonal ball on a sixpence, he f**ked up a 20 yard role out under no pressure at all. F**k me, have our expectations of our own players really fallen so pathetically low that we consider it ridiculous of the manager to expect a PL goalkeeper to do the absolute basics that a Sunday league pub keeper can get right?

TBH I think it might be. He has Hitler like delusions of grandeur, conquest and a glorious empire that have clouded his judgement. He most likely views Gorbachev’s Glasnost as something of a betrayal of the glory days of the Soviet Union and wants the 1970s back again. Even if Ukrainian resistance collapses and six months from now North Korean troops are drinking the bars of Uzhorod dry, he’ll still be faced with massive international sanctions and the sizeable cost of occupying an enormous country of 40 million hostile inhabitants. Then it’s just a matter of time before the next powder keg catches light.

Like I said, if he goes long then nine times out of ten it ends up back on the edge of our box 15 seconds and 5 Liverpool passes later. We end up losing 3-0 whilst barely getting out of our own half. McCarthy wasn’t being asked to play total football today, he made a brainless throw out to a player surrounded by Liverpool attackers that most Sunday league players would have known better than. Just because he is being told to play it out from the back, doesn’t mean he should be doing that.

Because when the ball comes back to him he can’t just pick it up and hold on to it for the next 87 minutes, that’s against the rules.

My point wasn’t about Bazunu, it was about the fact that last season people insisted that they didn’t care about distribution and now suddenly they do when the keeper can’t do it. The fact that McCarthy’s distribution is poor doesn’t imply that it’ll somehow better if he’s asked to go long all the time. All that’ll happen is the ball comes back his way 15 seconds later and Liverpool just dominate the whole game.

That basically is my point. When people were debating Bazunu vs McC last season the pro McC argument could basically be summed up as, "I don’t care about distribution, I want a keeper to do their job by saving shots FFS!" Well today (and Newcastle) are good examples of the distribution that apparently nobody cares about, except now they do care and apparently it’s the managers fault. I don’t care how the manager wants him to play, there’s no manager on earth who would want McC to play the ball out to Fernandes, right there at that moment. I used to play in goal for a 5-a-side team and even I’d have known not to make that pass. Mistakes from McCarthy, Downes and Sugawara have cost us a result today in a game where we played well. Even if you insist that first goal was totally, 100% Russ’ fault and the keeper played exactly how he wanted, we were 2-1 up after 65 minutes against the best team in the country. So how does that work, the team should have just been 2-0 up against Liverpool by default, but Russ ruined it?

Let’s have a look at what McCarthy ‘used to do’ in the PL before Russ.