Wes Tender

I agree. We will do better than that.

What a reasonable and rational post.

Competition for Pelle? What, you mean other than Mane, Rodriguez, Long and Juanmi? As for our attacking midfield options, it might well transpire that Clasie could fulfil that role when he is fit enough for a decent run in the team. Also our attacking options will be strengthened when Bertrand returns to push up out wide, when we have another CB to make the defence more secure, i.e, when we can field a fully fit first choice team, we will be able to be more offensive knowing that our defence is more sound. As for the projection of how other teams around us have made better signings in your opinion, my point is that it is silly to make such judgements on the basis of just three games. There were players signed out of nowhere last season by other teams who looked like world-beaters having scored goals in their first three matches, who then went on to score hardly anything for the rest of the season.

Two threads doesn't seem hysterical? OK, I'll downgrade that to either a knee-jerk reaction, or a "look at me" style cry for attention.

I thought that you deserved some congratulations, Saint Charlie; two threads after a match loss. You really do need to calm down and consider whether there is any way that the two could have been combined. That way the impression wouldn't be given that you are a bit hysterical at the moment.

Presumably you mean we need to strengthen our attack? Who do you suggest we replace? Mane who is rumoured to be wanted by Man Utd? He must be pretty crap then. Rodriguez, who Koeman asked Hodges not to select for England? Pelle? Which of these contemporaries do you mean and which players? I am impressed that on the strength of just three matches that you are able to project onwards the number of goals that they will score in a season to conclude that they are better than our strike force. How does Harry Kane rate against these other strikers, incidentally? He hasn't scored any goals yet.

Me too. The level of hysteria on here since last night is breathtaking. There are a couple of injuries to key players who would have made quite a difference had they played last night. Their covering players are not yet fully up to speed in gelling with their team mates and so we have suffered a bit of a stuttering start to the season. There are some on here who decry the loss of Pochettino, Alderweireld and even Mitchell to Spurs and yet they have made an identical start to the season. Maybe their fans' forum is also having kittens, perhaps even more so, being as how they always feel a far greater sense of entitlement than we do.

West End Brewery is showing the match tonight too

I know it is Liverpool's spin. That is why it is extremely ironic when it was obvious that our ex-players went to them for precisely those reasons. Most of their team play for them for those reasons and would be quite content to sit on the bench knowing that they are earning loadsamoney for doing so, but Enrique is the only one honest enough to admit it.

The Telegraph:- Surely all of the players Scousehampton bought from us were only motivated by money and the status of the club rather than a chance of playing.

Exactly. The moronic conclusion reached by the idiot Sinclair was that the sale of all those players pointed to a lack of ambition by the club. As an ex-footballer himself, he ought to have enough awareness of how footballers with ambition behave and how difficult it is for a club to keep players who want to leave for a higher placed club offering multiple times the wages. No doubt he would have declined such an offer himself, such would have been his commitment to aiding his club's ambitions over his own. The fact that all those players and the manager left last season and yet we managed to replace them with others who turned out to be capable of actually improving our position, must have had much more to do with luck than ambition in his opinion. He ought to stick purely to punditry of the matches, rather than commenting on things he knows nothing about, like concluding that the board of a club which has been on the greatest upward trajectory of any club in recent history had achieved that with a total lack of ambition.

You really are a dull wind-up merchant, aren't you? It seems to have escaped you that this last full season under RK, we achieved our best ever PL position. The only one devoid of any cohesion, style or belief is you.

Agreed, it is hard for players to resist the power of prayer.

Sums it all up very well in my opinion, particularly your mention of how we missed Davis' energy. There was a yawning chasm between the midfield and attack which he has been adept at linking. Also, he is very good at closing down players and tackling. But I suppose that with the sort of energy he always gives, he needs to be rested more than most. As for the time-wasting by Midtjylland, I really can't remember having seen so blatant an example and the referee must take the blame for not issuing a yellow card much earlier in the match. Theirs is a team of cheats, from the goallie taking ages on his kicks, the substitutes who would have walked off the pitch slower than a geriatric with a Zimmer frame and the defenders who fell to the ground mortally wounded from somebody breathing down their necks, or feigning cramp. That tactic effectively broke up any momentum we had developed, but after the second incident, the referee should have immediately have ordered the player off the pitch for treatment and continued play. And instead of giving them back the ball after their player had returned to his feet, we should have foregone any courtesy and kept the possession. At what point does cheating by one team not deserve to be retaliated to in kind? Overall though, despite the frustration of not being able to pull ahead in this game because of some sloppy defending, the lack of cohesion and the poor refereeing decisions that allowed the Danes to get away with such blatant gamesmnaship on the one hand, and to disallow us a perfectly good goal on the other, we ought to have enough to see us through the return fixture.

But there is an element of fun. Personally I take some quiet enjoyment in hearing all the doom and gloom peddled in the media about how our team is being ripped apart by the glory teams and that our chances of success are then going to be impeded to the extent that we will be at risk of relegation. There is then some satisfaction to be gained when we replace those players with cheaper gems that we unearth, who will then become the next batch to be poached by the glory teams, who seem incapable of finding and developing the players themselves. Provided that we can keep on doing that, the anticipation of seeing what we can come up with has some excitement to it.

In the nastiness stakes you are in a class of your own.

Was that him, or was it Cortese/Michell? And if he is to be credited with them, whose signings were Osvaldo and Ramirez?

The most significant 4-1 of all is now firmly in our favour and will be recorded in the annals of history of the rivalry between the clubs long after the significance of their two 4-1s are long forgotten. It is that we are in Division one and they are in Division four. I for one think that is worth throwing back in their faces each time they mention their Pyrrhic victories

The lure of the glory and the massive wage increase that Spurs offered must have been enough for Pochettino to give up his right to choose which players the club were to buy. That Fazio was a fellow countryman to Poch and that he would have had experience of him from Spain is a total coincidence. "Ees nussing to do wit me, signor" We have to count ourselves lucky that we have an illustrious former World class defender managing us who is able to get the best out of any defenders he signs, whereas Spurs have a lesser calibre of former international defender who is only a coach, but does not have that capability.

see post #61. We've both sussed it out.

Unlike Bertrand, who famously was labelled as a rubbish signing by somebody

Somebody has probably misheard him talking about his new villa on the Algarve and got the wrong end of the stick.

It can't be used as a measure in Portsmouth's case though, as it requires not only an element of technological know how, but also a level of literacy, both of which are in short supply from the knuckle-draggers that support them.

As Corbyn appears to be in the position (if polls are to be believed) that he could possibly accrue sufficient votes to be elected without subsequent ballots, I wonder whether your cocky, over-confident predictions that he will not win are looking a little shaky? Perhaps you have not taken sufficient account of the number of people who have either joined the Labour Party from the left to vote for him, or those from other Parties who will vote for him in order to scupper Labour's chances in the next General Election. I'll certainly be giving him my wholehearted support and know of several friends who will do so too.

A great summary as usual and only the date of the match being a bone of contention.