Lighthouse

So we should always be like the two clubs who happen to be doing well right now on a relatively low budget, just because? That’s very much the anomaly, rather than the norm. We had our turn doing that between 2012 and 2016, it’s never sustainable long term. If I was a betting man I’d say both of those clubs will be fighting relegation in the next couple of seasons.

No, never at any point have I wanted either of those managers. Both will take us down, this argument is like saying, “this broken arm is terrible, I wish I had a broken leg FFS!”

Not arrogance but poverty. It’s almost amusing hearing people talk about the £70m we spent in summer as a huge investment. Our supposed big spending bonanza was basically 0.95 Nicolas Pepes.

That either of them would almost certainly take us down, so what’s the point in appointing a short term stop gap, with no real motivation to build a project?

He reminds me of an old Peter Sellers.

The man who got relegated with a much better team than this?

You say that like it’s a lot of money. £70m is bog standard for treading water, not soaring up the league. Generally speaking it is a marginally better squad, just hopeless in front of goal.

A third of the clubs in the football league are at moderate risk of relegation. Another third are chasing promotion, the league title or entry into Europe. Most of the fans of these clubs (some sixty-odd out of ninety two) will be demanding transfers in January to ensure they achieve their targets this season. Zero will be demanding their club sells decent players as soon as possible. Hardly any business will be done by anyone in the first week of the window and not much will be done at all. It’s January, it’s like this for everyone.

Coming up soon. Sadly Palace aren’t in it.

Hell, I’d have Steve De Ridder over Moi and Walcott. Whenever I look back on that season, it’s always weird seeing Lee Holmes on the team sheets. In my mind he was always just an injured, Poortvliet flop for us.

Fraser Forster diving down to stop a shot at... oh wait no, sorry I've got that joke wrong.

Plus he would actually have to sign a contract at a club he knows he wont be playing for, for no benefit to himself.

Without wanting to labour the point too much, I just don’t get it. I don’t get how any professional footballer, let alone a PL striker does all that wiggling to try and get around the keeper and when he does finally do it and gets into this position just stops and waits. It’s as if he wanted it to be saved, to save him the embarrassment of missing from a yard out again. There’s a lack of belief and then there’s this.

We almost never buy players from other PL teams anyway as they represent terrible value for money. Nobody is going to want to sell anyone half decent. We will sign the players we’ve always signed; youth, Championship and foreign ones.

I can’t imagine any reason why we’d be any different to any other set of fans, given our consistently poor results, overall, since 2016.

All that means is that we have two decent Championship players who are thoroughly inadequate at this level. Tella did absolutely nothing last year, whereas Armstrong scored a couple of goals. Neither are worth having in this league.

The first true test of what a Jones team is capable of. I’m hoping Lavia is back to replace AMN and we don’t repeat that first half against Lincoln.

We aren’t getting anything out of the system, this crap has been happening all season. Without it we’d be mid table and it’s going to carry on happening.

That and the fact that he did all that p*ssing around, trying to get around the keeper and when he did he still wouldn’t shoot. Wouldn’t even take on the single defender standing on the line. The fact that our best striker has such awful instincts in front of goal is pathetic.

Just back from possibly the sh*test win I’ve ever been to. Lincoln looked like a mid table League 1 team, well up for a cup game. Nothing more, nothing less. Against Prem opposition, we’ll get battered playing like that. First half especially was awful, three CBs knocking it over the top for a goal kick. We’ll never get the time and space to score those two goals in a league game and the two misses… holy sh*t. Adams and the keeper could have won Strictly with the second one. TBF to Jones and the team, we did look better after the subs but that’s starting from a pretty poor datum. Perraud and Adams I though we’re decent throughout, Stu and Edozie likewise when they came on, misses aside. AMN looked like he’d won a competition to play the first half. The defence were never really troubled enough to comment, their #7 looked like he could play a bit but that’s all.

Because we have an open and free press, which is allowed to criticise public figures. It won’t always be nice and some people will abuse that privilege but it’s important to have it.

Whereas these days you just get pretty much ignored by people who are bored with how gullible you are.

The greatest final, perhaps, but there were quite a few 0-0s earlier on and aside from France and Argentina, none of the decent teams really turned up. Germany and Belgium were very poor, Italy not present, Brazil, Portugal and Spain all substandard, England about par for the course but nothing more. A very good WC overall but I’m not sure if it was the best.

Probably enough to have finished him off.

France look dead on their feet.