Lighthouse

Mid table?! We have comfortably one of the bottom three, if not the worst, squads in the league.

Playing as a central striker at a Championship level is undoubtedly where BBD plays best. He’ll score goals there if we go down, as will Archer, with Armstrong on the right. We’ve got plenty of Championship standard firepower on the books already. Im not sure why we’d only want our money back on Downes. We don’t want to sell him and he’ll have a year of PL on when we first bought him. I don’t see why we’d want to sell him unless we were getting a substantial profit.

I’m not sure Downes has done enough to have PL battering down the door for him. Our Adams replacements will be BBD and Archer, so I’d argue we’re already stronger in that department. Suga will probably be decent in a team I’d expect to be attacking more often than not. His clangers will probably not get punished quite so ruthlessly as they are now.

I am so sorry for Alex McCarthy that being asked to play basic underarm passes out to a teammate twenty yards away is so far beyond his apparent abilities. I thought perhaps a PL keeper might be capable of that but clearly not. However you try and dress it up though, last time we went down he was conceding three and four every game, against much worse teams than the one we played yesterday. If he just boots it up the field all the time, perhaps we concede four or five yesterday, who knows.

I don’t care how Russ asked him to play, a professional goalkeeper shouldn’t be doing that. He's clearly defending his players in the media, which I admire but it’s not necessarily the whole truth. McCarthy is very clearly Martin’s third choice keeper when everyone is fit, that’s how highly he actually rates him. I thought everything Martin said in interviews was absolute nonsense and we didn’t listen to it. I am gobsmacked that anyone who watches football would blame Bazunu for the goals we conceded against Ipswich last year but NOT blame McC for the first goal yesterday.

I would expect to lose those players, possibly with the exception of Downes, and hopefully add Lallana, ABK and Sully. With Les and Max’s loans finishing it actually leaves us with a decent Championship squad in terms of size and quality, without having to make any signings, which may be something of a relief.

Yes, correct. I know that pass shouldn’t have been made, so do you, so does every fan in the stadium. So don’t you think it’s reasonable for our manager to expect a PL goalkeeper not to make it? Maybe take a breather for a few seconds and look for a better pass?

I’m sorry but at some point you have to be able ask Premier League footballers to do the absolute bare minimum basics correctly. We’re not asking him to stick a 70 yard diagonal ball on a sixpence, he f**ked up a 20 yard role out under no pressure at all. F**k me, have our expectations of our own players really fallen so pathetically low that we consider it ridiculous of the manager to expect a PL goalkeeper to do the absolute basics that a Sunday league pub keeper can get right?

TBH I think it might be. He has Hitler like delusions of grandeur, conquest and a glorious empire that have clouded his judgement. He most likely views Gorbachev’s Glasnost as something of a betrayal of the glory days of the Soviet Union and wants the 1970s back again. Even if Ukrainian resistance collapses and six months from now North Korean troops are drinking the bars of Uzhorod dry, he’ll still be faced with massive international sanctions and the sizeable cost of occupying an enormous country of 40 million hostile inhabitants. Then it’s just a matter of time before the next powder keg catches light.

Like I said, if he goes long then nine times out of ten it ends up back on the edge of our box 15 seconds and 5 Liverpool passes later. We end up losing 3-0 whilst barely getting out of our own half. McCarthy wasn’t being asked to play total football today, he made a brainless throw out to a player surrounded by Liverpool attackers that most Sunday league players would have known better than. Just because he is being told to play it out from the back, doesn’t mean he should be doing that.

Because when the ball comes back to him he can’t just pick it up and hold on to it for the next 87 minutes, that’s against the rules.

My point wasn’t about Bazunu, it was about the fact that last season people insisted that they didn’t care about distribution and now suddenly they do when the keeper can’t do it. The fact that McCarthy’s distribution is poor doesn’t imply that it’ll somehow better if he’s asked to go long all the time. All that’ll happen is the ball comes back his way 15 seconds later and Liverpool just dominate the whole game.

That basically is my point. When people were debating Bazunu vs McC last season the pro McC argument could basically be summed up as, "I don’t care about distribution, I want a keeper to do their job by saving shots FFS!" Well today (and Newcastle) are good examples of the distribution that apparently nobody cares about, except now they do care and apparently it’s the managers fault. I don’t care how the manager wants him to play, there’s no manager on earth who would want McC to play the ball out to Fernandes, right there at that moment. I used to play in goal for a 5-a-side team and even I’d have known not to make that pass. Mistakes from McCarthy, Downes and Sugawara have cost us a result today in a game where we played well. Even if you insist that first goal was totally, 100% Russ’ fault and the keeper played exactly how he wanted, we were 2-1 up after 65 minutes against the best team in the country. So how does that work, the team should have just been 2-0 up against Liverpool by default, but Russ ruined it?

Let’s have a look at what McCarthy ‘used to do’ in the PL before Russ.

I can't recall seeing Ramsdale or Bazunu playing that ball and it's certainly not one that any manager would have wanted him to play. Yes we play out from the back but that ball to Fernandes was never on. Even so, we didn't lose the ball and Downes had a perfectly good oportunity to deal with it, until he smacked it straight at Szobozs... the Hungarian fellar, trying to go long down the pitch. The first goal was a McCarthy and Downes mistake. Whatever his instructions were, McC shouldn't have played that. Even in spite of that moment, we were 2-1 up after 65 minutes. We were half an hour from winning. Playing out from the back had zero to do with what happened from there. Zero.

What kind of passing out from the back was there in the second and third goals we conceded? Even the first is on McC for very poor decision making and Downes, who miss kicked whilst trying to boot it long up the pitch.

You’re in for a very nasty surprise when Russell does eventually get the sack and players like McCarthy and Sugawara keep making mistakes.

He’s 18 in we’re basically relying on him to be our best creative player in every match. If we’re not careful he’ll be the next Livramento or Lavia.

Cant really fault the team too much for that. It was a decent enough performance overall but ultimately individual errors have cost us a result against comfortably the league’s best side. McC is our third choice keeper for a reason, Downes is far from the finished article and Suga…. I really want to like the guy but he just serves up clangers with too much regularity.

If that ball ricocheted very slightly off his legs in that scramble, it could have been in our net five seconds later. He’s had a good half overall but he got a touch fortunate there.

That was actually a decent half of football, I think we did alright considering the opposition. Paul looking decent enough on the ball, although if we’re being completely honest there was a touch of fortune about that moment just before half time. Obviously we look weaker at the back without JB and Ramsdale but there’s not much we can do about that. McC is our third choice keeper for a reason and we’re going to have accept mistakes like that to an extent (Downes and THB far from blameless either).

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family of Darwin Nunez at this difficult time. A truly haunting passage of events which will live with them for decades to come.

It wasn’t. It was a stonewall foul right on the line, which unquestionably continued into the box.

Never in doubt.

You’re saying it was a good choice to pass to Fernandes there?