Lighthouse

Was the previous leadership contest longer than her actual leadership?

As posted on the main board, her premiership has seen more Monarchs than Saints wins.

So basically her leadership has seen more monarchs than Saints wins. Cracking stat, that.

Even the weather's brightened up in the last ten minutes here.

Christ, we were 15 hours away from having three prime ministers in between Saints victories.

Apart from Spurs and City, we’ve still had a result on the table going into stoppage time of every game. Generally speaking we’ve been competitive, if not pretty. Compared to last season’s 4-0 at Villa, 3-0 at Brentford, 4-1 at Leicester and that embarrassment at home to Chelsea we’ve certainly been better this season. Not great but better.

So? We beat Chelsea and we're below them, what's your point?

I think that’s a wildly optimistic take on it from a Forest perspective. They may have two clean sheets but they’ve drawn a blank themselves in six games and conceded three or more against four teams, including Bournemouth, Leicester and Fulham. Aside from trips to Spurs and Man City, all our games have been tight and could have gone either way. Since swapping to a back four Everton are the only other team to score twice against us. Put it this way, I doubt any fans of the four midland teams are thinking, "I’m glad we’re not Southampton," this morning.

We needed to lose the last two in order to beat Arsenal at home, so unfortunately I don’t we’ll get anything.

A win and a clean sheet, away from home, with our two best players injured. I’ll take that against any opposition, any season. If we can play well for periods against Wolves, Spurs and Everton and get zero points, I’m taking the three when we’re sh*te, no questions asked. That’s football.

Even if Edozie is better than Moi, and I’m not saying he isn’t, what would you expect us to do if he starts, Bournemouth make four second half subs and are all over us, like West Ham were? Armstrong is in no sort of form, Walcott is useless, Moi certainly isn’t going to change a game and Mara is as of yet unproven.

Well, it’s the team which could have been 3-0 up at HT with better finishing, so unless you think Walcott or Mara are going to rectify that, I’m not sure why the facepalm.

TBH, that post wasn’t even about defending Ralph. Villa have a team full of attackers they’ve spent £30m plus on; Ings, Watkins, Buendia, Bailey and Coutinho. Ralph is trying to get goals out of Mara, Adams, Moi, Aribo and Armstrong. There’s a difference, no matter how low you rate a manager. I don’t rate Puel, he’d have done better with Mané, Portvleit would have done better with Lambert, Burley would have done better with Hooiveld.

It’s fairly simple, Saints fans can’t be arsed forking out to watch that sh*te every week, especially with the cost of living rocketing. By contrast this is the one local game a season Arsenal fans get to go to, tickets are probably £10 cheaper than anything at the Emirates and they’re going to win. I’m not surprised they’ll be packed into the home end.

He’d do alright there because they have better players.

I have no idea why you think I would bother to play that video.

Not sure what to make of this Belarusian build up of troops. The quoted number of 9,000, no doubt ill equipped and low in morale, is not going to trouble the defences around Kyiv.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-63292320 Even a state of the art, NASA 3D micro-printer wouldn’t be able to model a violin small enough for what I’m feeling.

I think the answer to that might be found here: https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/aston-villa/transferrekorde/verein/405

Criminal to sell a player who was thoroughly mediocre throughout large parts of last season? I’m starting to wonder, after Ralph does leave, how long it’ll take for people to start feeling nostalgic about him too.

Selling him wasn’t the problem, he was underperforming badly at the end of last season. Signing AMN was the problem; I sort of expected a man who’s played 140 times for Arsenal to know what he’s doing. I’m guessing our recruitment team did too.

That would be the starting XI which played well first half and was 1-0 up at halftime? Would you rather he did nothing when West Ham have taken the initiative?

A hard fought point and an improvement. Something to build on and hope the injury to ABK isn’t serious.

We weren’t talking about that, we were talking about hypothetically losing due to individual errors and how we’d judge the teams performance in spite of that. If Ralph is that bad that he makes a 20 year just give up on his whole career then I agree, sack him. However I don’t think that’s realistic. Confidence will come with experience for Baz. Adams I don’t think lacks it as such, he just has issues with concentration and is prone to absolute brain farts. Neither is anything to do with Ralph.

No amount of confidence or motivation is going to make Che score that chance against Wolves. He could literally have licked the ball as it was dropping down and it would have diverted across the line, no management or coaching can mitigate for that. Likewise Baz is a young keeper and PL debutant, there are going to be many more mistakes along the way. Klopp couldn’t stop Karius and Mignolet from making errors at Liverpool and neither will Ralph, nor any other manager, do the same for our keepers.