DuncanRG

The centre halves were excellent there. Constant pressure but not that many chances.

Which is exactly what we did at the Etihad under Pellegrino, and almost got away with a point. It's a fair tactic, especially when confidence is low, but last night we weren't good enough on the ball to relieve pressure when we got hold of it. The second half showed a slow building of confidence which strikes me as sensible.

No, it says a new director of football equivalent will be in place before the next international break in late November. Nothing to do with transfers.

Agreed, but I appreciate them bringing in the big guns for this piece. David Ornstein and the like have decades of experience and contact-building to bring to the party, which is what you really need to get inside organisations as secretive as football clubs. Neither Carl nor the Echo have the resources to put together something like this alone. Frankly I'm not sure how much he does want to stay, reading that. One journo (can't remember who) mentioned on Sunday Supplement the other day that he could jump at the next offer from another club.

Yes. Their job is not only to stop goals, which is what you said explicitly. Implicitly, you suggested they were lumps, which they're not.

Didn't see that happening, and I was in front of him for practically the whole game cause he swapped sides.

Yep, nothing progressive or unusual about Sheffield United's centre halves. Nothing at all.

Ha!

He's had a crap season but he's capable of much better and is one of very few players with leadership qualities.

It's not like they've chosen to give the money instead of working on the football. This is a nice gesture but nobody's pretending that's problem solved. It's also worth saying that a week's wages will be more significant to most members of the coaching staff than to a player. I don't know how much they earn but it won't be ludicrous amounts.

I think Lucy's great but at times like these I could really just listen to Adam for an hour. That insight is what sets this pod apart.

I do.

They could sink lower. They could lose our other games, beyond City. I don't want that to happen.

Forster proved for us that he could be a very good keeper. It's no surprise to see him doing well. But there are all kinds of reasons why players thrive in different environments. Tactics, coaches, the style and quality of the league they're in, even their personal lives. I don't think any of our senior loanees are doing so well that we should think about bringing them back in.

Hard to give it much weight when they haven't given their methodology, though a lot of those results aren't exactly shocking.

They've embarrassed the shirt but being aggressive to them is only going to make the fans feel better. Won't do the team any good at all and makes another humiliation more likely.

When did he do this? Do you mean the post-match when he said he'd get into trouble for speaking from the heart?

Que? He changes the team all the time, sometimes two or three times a game. I'd say the departure of your chairman, DoF and head of recruitment is pretty radical. Corporate restructures take time.

It's very clearly been briefed by the club. It's their take on events but it's useful to know either way. Which bits do you think are alluding to player dissatisfaction with the manager?

No disputes there, it was a good summer and I'd do it again if I had the chance. But a bigger squad still costs money and it didn't really slim down once we fell out of the Europa League. Obviously Carillo's the worst of the worst.

Krueger, Reed and Wilson gone, replacements either here or in the pipeline but with a restructure. They reviewed all that over the summer, though we haven't had the results of it communicated in full. There's a mention in that Telegraph story today about ensuring there's one individual with ultimate power on transfers, which we apparently didn't have before. New CFO as well, I believe, though that's a separate issue.

I was saying on the way out of St Mary's that it was hard to tell if we were lazy or just shellshocked. Watching back on MOTD makes it clear that the effort was nowhere near good enough, on top of everything else.

Off the top of my head we signed Romeu, Van Dijk, Clasie, Juanmi, Cedric, Stekelenburg, Martina and Caulker that summer. With the last three of those eight the club was pretty explicit that they'd come to pad out the squad. We didn't sell eight players and didn't have a tiny squad to begin with. Poor recruitment is, of course, the main culprit. The bloated squad makes it harder to keep up with market inflation, even if there's more we could have done.

We are tackling the backroom issues. We'll have to wait and see if we've tackled them well.

Yeah he would. Not the good ones, but he would.