Lighthouse

I would take him, assuming we couldn’t find another player with a better fitness record, but people talking about the one season in his career when he stayed fit and scored 22 goals really need to lower their expectations. He has fitness problems and if he ends up on loan in the Championship it’ll be for a very good reason.

Great season, no doubt about it. Doesn’t change the rest of what I said though. Ings was James Beattie with injuries. Decent on his day but never ‘world class’. Given choice, I’d have Beattie, Lambert or Pellè over him.

Yep. And thoroughly mediocre in the other two, and every other in his PL career. His second best season goals tally at that level is 12.

I don’t think averaging 13 goals a season counts as world class but he was decent overall. Personally I have my doubts he’d stay fit enough to make it worth it and whether or not his motivation would be there.

To do what? Stick around as a lower mid table side, flirting with relegation?

His bank manager disagrees.

I broadly agree with this and in isolation you'd never say there's anything wrong with a point a piece in back to back games at Watford and Coventry. What concerns me most is our completely inability to put in a truly strong performance, which includes taking our chances and maximising our good play. Our points total, as you say, would usually put you top two but we're halfway through the season with a GD of +4. That's pretty awful and is normally indicative of a team struggling to get into the top half, not league leaders.

Once again our plan to become the best Championship team ever, by winning every game 1-0, seems to have come unstuck.

And New Orleans Saints.

The Same Dozie player scores!

Substandard.

pas /pɑː/ noun a step in dancing, especially in classical ballet.

Dawson was one of the few Stars to come out of their innings with any credit, 22 n/o against Scorchers.

A different player obviously but your post made me realise how quickly I'd forgotten our own Diallo ever existed.

It’s a freak season. Even including our awful September we’ve averaged enough points per game to finish on 87, which last season would have put us 3rd and 4 points behind Sheff United. Ipswich and Leicester are on course for 111 and 113 points respectively, both comfortably a record total for this league.

0.75 goals conceded per game would literally have been the best defence in the league last season. It’s utterly laughable that people talk about this as ‘costing us points’.

Myra Hindley’s mum or Idi Amin’s landscape gardner?

It was a very good save, some people just need to talk down everything Bazunu does. He could have done better with the goal, as with a couple of the Sunderland goals and one against Boro. On the flip side his shot stopping is generally sound, he communicates very well with his defence, comes out and deals with stuff (the Cardiff header) and his district excellent. Since getting our act together in September we’ve conceded 1-0-1-1-2-1-0-1-1-0-0-1. That’s 9 goals in 12 games, which should be good enough to win any league.

You've missed the point entirely. We're only 1-0 up because the rest of the team has spent the last 95 minutes missing passes and shots which weren't overly difficult, which would have put us comfortably ahead. So once again, because of a substandard effort by our forward line, we're in a sudden death position, where any mistake from the keeper costs us two points. He hasn't done it plenty of times, he's made a reasonable, average number of mistakes which I'd expect from any keeper.

I think you probably need a different AA.

If you can’t get into our crap forward line because you’re even crapper, that’s really not much of a statement about your contribution to the squad. Besides, with the exception of Edozie those players all get onto the pitch at some point most game and seem to do very little. If we’re 3-0 today, Watford pretty much give up after 80 minutes and the game dies out. Being on a knife edge every week on 90+6 is going to cost us as often as not. Doesn’t matter if it’s Baz’s mistake, THB or someone giving it away in midfield.

Amazing just how much stick Baz gets for basically being the MotM, keeping us in it and making an excellent save just before we score, but making a mistake which is ultimately punished because yet again we’re only one goal ahead. Why does the Alcaraz thread never get bumped, even though he consistently churns in sub-par performances and has one goal this season? Along with Mara, Edozie, Adams and Sully he is far more deserving of the flak aimed at Baz.

The goal difference of the top 5 +26 +18 +16 +4 +10 I think that probably illustrates our problem better than anything else. We’re marginally better than most of the teams we play, but just not good enough to win convincingly. That’s Huddersfield and today where we’ve been mugged off at the end. You can blame individual mistakes if you like but if we’d been 3-0 up that goal wouldn’t have mattered.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/67663582 Because Russians are obviously going to pretend that all their athletes are suddenly ‘neutral’.

New contracts for Prest, Albert, Middleton and Turner; great news.