Lighthouse

Have we tried four at the back since being 3-0 down after 14 minutes against Spurs? We seem to be compensating for the fact that most of our defenders and our central midfield are, to put it mildly, sh*te.

He looked poor in the Championship, Juventus didn't rate him and nobody in the PL wanted to buy him in summer. Selling him allowed us to buy Ramsdale and we've got Fernandes in his position, who is a far better player. Let's not get too excited because a rebound fell to his feet eight yards out against Palace.

Everton have always had far better players than we have, their problem was Dyche. Whilst some like to pretend he's a no nonsense, old school, tough pragmatic manager who's teams are well organised and hard to beat, in actuality he's just a bit crap. That's Burnley and Everton he's now taken to the brink of relegation, only for them to have a massive improvement in form when he was sacked. Juric and Martin between them have scraped together nine points. An absolutely excellent manager who's highly unlikely to come here might have managed fourteen or fifteen but ultimately, we're still finishing bottom.

I don’t know why anyone would want him out or what anyone thinks he’s supposed to be doing with these players. Whether he’s the man to take us up next season I don’t know but you can’t blame him for this.

It’s going to take more than slutty nuns to win today. I’ll try a lucky neutron star.

James Bree, Nathan Wood and Will Smallbone all starting a Premier League football match together. What a time to be alive.

Indeed. People need to be more pacific with they're grammar.

Lhuandre Pretorius replaces McDermott as our overseas batsmen for the Hawks. Technically we could have both but you'd imagine we're after a bowler instead.

TBH I’ll be quite happy to see him back next season. He’s a perfectly decent Championship keeper and it’s mildly amusing to watch the same people throwing an absolute tantrum at every goal we concede. The fact that people are piling into him now, playing his first competitive football in nearly a year, behind a clearly crap defence, just shows how much people want to hate him.

You’d have to be rather more naive to believe that: a) Ukraine would negotiate a deal which literally gives them nothing. It’s basically a piece of paper that says, "we’re okay with everything Russia has done." b) Russia will stop fighting when they’ve been officially rewarded for what they’ve done so far but haven’t got everything they want yet.

You’ve been saying this for three years now. I’ll believe it when both sides actually agree to a treaty and it holds. You seem very keen to tell everyone you’ve been proven right, just because the old man who thinks air traffic controllers are blind, black, lesbian psychiatric patients says he wants to talk to Putin.

Why would Ukraine agree to any kind of deal in which they were not involved in any kind of negotiation and get nothing out of? This isn’t a negotiated settlement, it’s simply a case of whether or not Ukraine can continue to defend itself without US military aid.

This, in a nutshell. We’re still nowhere nearer to any actual agreement between Russia and Ukraine. Trump will no doubt meet up with mad Vlad, as it’ll look good for both of them politically, and agree to a bunch of stuff that Ukraine will have no desire to accept. What it’ll come down to then is whether the rest of Europe, without the involvement of the USA will continue to help Ukraine on the battlefield.

No you wouldn’t.

I understand the frustration but I’m not buying this bit. The players are trying, they’re just extremely limited in their ability.

I’d say most flights are ‘low level’ when they’re taking off TBH.

Sharing this again because it was just ridiculous.

This post reads like nothing but hard feelings to me. If you only accept players who derive their morals from 17th century naval warfare, you’re going to have a pretty small squad.

He’s clearly a far, far better player than Smallbone and would be a class above most midfielders in the Championship. You’d be nuts not to want him but he won’t be coming back whilst we’re a league below. I’d want someone more physical along side him but you don’t just need big cloggers to get out of the Championship.

He’ll have Prem suitors in summer, either on loan or permanent deals. If nothing else he’s exactly the kind of player one of the promoted sides should be looking at.

I thought we were the people’s front?

We just barely managed to paper over the cracks of Stephens and Bednarek through a combination of Hassenhutl being an excellent manager and having superior players like Bertrand, Romeu, Livramento and KWP around them. They were always a serious weakness and a whole team of Bednarek/Stephens standard players would have been relegated, even with Ralph in charge. Half the time they couldn’t even get into the team ahead of thoroughly average players, like Hoedt and Vestergaard. Two years ago we tried, and failed, to replace both of them with DCC and ABK. To put it bluntly, they’re both crap and I don’t think any Saints manager has ever really wanted either in their team, we’ve just failed consistently to recruit better centre halves.

Liverpool in 2017 was nowhere near the level they’re at now and in two of those games we played Yoshida and Virgil in defence. If I’m remembering rightly, the league game against Anfield would have been about 5-0 if FF hadn’t had the game of his life. In any case, the main point stands; Bednarek and Stephens have never been anything close to a competent defensive PL unit.

Bednarek never played for Puel, who really didn’t keep that many clean sheets after we lost Fonte and Virgil for the season. He also had prime Romeu sat in front of the defence and he was far better than anything we’ve got now and we played very defensive football. Most of his clean sheets were 0-0s at home to teams like West Brom, Hull and Bournemouth. None of our defenders have played better than they have this season, Stephen’s and Bednarek have always been a liability. The fact that Bree, Manning and Wood are getting games at all in the PL is just utterly laughable.

It doesn’t exist, it’s a media construct to get people to tune into a competition which is little more than an unwanted distraction for 90% of clubs involved. People like to romanticise about how great it used to be but honestly, did anyone care about Bradford vs Watford in the eighties?