Lighthouse

He’s had a few moments Bazunu would have been crucified for; Leicester’s winner, Man City’s goal, Bournemouth’s third, last nights error that lead to the goal line clearance. I think playing for us after Arsenal has just knocked his confidence a bit, hopefully it’s just a temporary blip and he finds his mojo soon.

We’re in the QF having scored nine goals in three games and won a shootout at Goodison. If that’s ‘fucking useless’ I can’t wait to see what ‘average’ looks like under the next manager.

Strange. Half an hour ago when I said we were playing well, everyone was laughing at me and saying the score was the only stat that mattered. Now we’ve won, suddenly it’s, "yeah but apart from the score, what was good about it?" TBH I don’t know what the datum is for Saints any more, but I’ll take winning a cup tie and scoring three goals any season.

Koeman went out of the cup at League 1 Sheffield Utd. Strachan needed an injury time equaliser at home to Millwall in round four to reach the 2003 final. Puel got to Wembley with an absolute dredge of a performance against Palace, saved by one moment of brilliance by Boufal. Poch went out against Sunderland with everyone fuming that he’d rested players. If you think we’re entitled to a default 5-0 performance in any cup tie, I don’t know which club you’ve been supporting up until now.

We won a cup tie, scored three goals and could have had a couple more with better finishing. If you can’t enjoy that, you’re going to be severely disappointed when Russ gets sacked (and he will eventually) and quelle surprise, these players make the same mistakes under the new manager. In other news, Brentford drew 1-1 at home to a Championship team with 70% possession, so we’ve had a much better night than them.

Decent cup tie, when all’s said and done. Into the QFs we go.

Decent finish that. Let’s hope we can concentrate better with this lead.

We’re outplaying them by any metric you can muster. All the play is in their half and if Armstrong, Suga and Les could do the simple things properly, we’d have been 3-0 up at half time.

We’ve completely outplayed Stoke here, they’ve not had a sniff apart from two goals from individual howlers. So we’ll add them to the list, along with Smallbone, Bazunu, McCarthy, Wood, Fraser, Manning, Bree, Stephens, Diaz and Armstrong. We’re a bit short of decent options, all things considered.

Do you think a different manager would be able to build a better game plan around the hapless performances of Les, Cornet and Suga?

Suga…. I want to like you, I really, really do.

Decent half overall, shame about Fraser’s injury. Hopefully it’s not too bad.

Bit of a lucky deflection that, shame as it’s been their only meaningful attack.

You think it’s pessimistic to have a reliable goal scorer on the books for a scenario more than half of promoted teams end up facing?

He’s about as reliable a Championship scorer as you’ll find, definitely worth keeping with that in mind.

Didn’t he present Get your own back?

Looked decent so far without actually scoring. As I type, there it is!

ABK is not in our plans and clearly hasn’t been for a long time, I’m not sure why you were hoping for/expecting anything different tonight. I’m not sure what this forum’s obsession with Lucy is all about either. Personally, I think that’s a decent side which should have too much for Stoke.

People who put ‘POV’ on all their social media posts. I know it’s POV, that’s literally how a camera works you f**knugget.

Tadic for me, scored a goal and set up six others in one game. That’ll never be beaten. Mané is the fifth best player I’ve seen for us, after the three I mentioned and Niemi.

Luis Boa Morte went on to be a much better player at Fulham than he was in his season here.

I don't know why people say stuff like this, when it's very obviously not true, as if Russ somehow doesn't know that his job depends on results. The persona this forum creates for him just gets weirder by the day. Next week people will be saying, "we won 7-0 in spite of Russ and he shot Bambi's mum."

Chance of a cup QF to at least give us some cheer this season. Hopefully we put a full(ish) strength team out for this.

Or maybe because it’s literally only Arsenal (and Inter if we’re doing all comps) who’ve gone to the Etihad and done better than us this season. Compared to Ipswich going there and being 3-0 down in 16 minutes, we have actually done alright.

I see you've correctly identified that, 'all his fault' and 'blameless' are the only two possible options.