cityfanlee23

He's a £20m player that has had 1 productive season in 3, and from the buying clubs perspective, the good season was his first, then he sustained a massive potentially career hurting injury, battled back to fitness, and put in 8/10 stinkers on return. Now he has to step up to a far higher level, and he's in a team that cannot afford to carry luxury players. They've spent £20m and need a player that creates explosive moments, too often over the last year he's dithered on the ball and ended up killing many attacks by himself, he's done the same in the limited time i've seen so far. I guess £20m in the grand scheme of things isn't major, and he's a player they can afford to keep if they go down, Abdul wasn't one of the "bad ones" from last season, but he was the player who frustrated me the most, so many times our play went through him and he fumbled. He doesn't look anything like the player we had 23/24, maybe it's confidence, maybe it's the managers, maybe it's the system, maybe it's the injury.

We’ve done well out of Abdul. Bloke is bang average 8/10 games. Absolutely bang average. One of the most predictable players I’ve seen in years. Love the guy but his injury and back to back relegations with us look like it’s killed his confidence. Huge gamble for Ipswich.

Result didn't matter for me today, we are too light in depth to be worrying about a good cup run, we need all our energy for the league. Thought we played well today, few error but this team should start next match. Dropping the CBs improved us 10-fold. Martin got most of it right today, today was about performance and confidence, and in that we looked good. Completely different team today.

Oh ffs Russell....

Seems vocal, he was really getting into HH when he didn't chase a ball down.

Really good first half, genuinely played well right across the pitch. Today is a free hit as far as i'm concerned as we are thin in depth so not fussed at all if we go out, today is all about confidence and performance.

We just love loaning gems whilst spending millions on absolute guff don't we...

How's the possession looking lads?

I don't know what to think at this point? Making a point to the players? Making a point to the board? Being really really stupid? I guess option 4 would be some masterstroke but I think that dream will be over within 10 minutes. Surely to god we should just be treating this game as a free hit and playing our best team to continue to give them minutes playing this system competitively? How does completely changing the back 4 to 4 full backs help us with cohesion? Martin really impressed me during pre season right up until the final game, since then it's been a disaster.

Me sat here googling "Nigel Pearson health update"

We need a takeover and QUICKLY.

True, focus on the positives! We are 1 step closer to a new manager!

Football Manager next year is going to be so good!! Can't wait!

Hate to say we warned you, but a sizeable portion of the forum warned you... It's not just RM. It's the style. It's dead in the water without £200m squads.

Can we skip to the part where we get taken over, and go all out to bring in the Two Ralphs?

Any links?

I really hope McCarron has a contingency plan, if we are sitting mid table 10-15 games in, we simply cannot afford to stay down. Likely be some new names available, but looking at who is available right now, I think a fair few of these would turn us down without significant ownership changes and money to spend. - Rob Edwards? - Dave Challinor - Scott Parker - Gerhard Struber - Ralph Hassenhuttl - Jon Dahl Tomasson - Alan Sheehan - Liam Manning (Unlikely to return to football just yet) RM really needs to get this right, or we need to pray we are sold to a mega owner willing to convince a top manager to come to us on big wages.

Stephen Mfuni went to Watford on on loan in January, played 8 games, got injured for the season, and their steady form collapsed the moment he left. Watford rumoured to want him back again as well as Swansea, but we have the Enzo link, Mfuni would be playing at a lower level, but he would be getting trained day in day out as a Ball Playing Defender, by a manager renowned for for a high possession style. Any other League One club I think would struggle to battle Watford/Swansea, and we might do too, but we offer something that benefits the player and Enzo that they don't, he might need a few more weeks, but he did play 45 mins against Milan.

Can we not just put Jakub on an intense passing, control and dribbling regime for 2 months?

We are barely Leicester City now and we are in massive debt. Which club are you referring to? Red Bull Leipzig have less debt than we do, and run a far better business than KP does. I don't think there are many modern football clubs that run at a profit or run really sustainably, and if we can find an owner that would run us like say Brighton then we should go for it, worth noting that Red Bull operate their network in a similar way, buy low, sell high. As I said, I completely get why the majority of fans would be completely against a name or badge change, and that's why I don't think it should happen, whereas I'm not tribal about it. I support Leicester and they are the only club I support, or ever will support, but I've never really been tribal about anything. I'm an F1 fan, so I guess I'm used to constant name and brand changes. I completely get peoples anger at that sort of thing, just look at Salzburg who had a portion of fans create a brand new club because RB dropped the purple kit in favour of white. In the end, RB Salzburg play better football, have more money, are more successful, buy and progress players that go on to be world class talent, something they would not be doing if they had not been bought. If we can find a Brighton/Coventry style owner I'd probably choose that, but 99% of owners are not like that.

As I said, give me them over an American consortium keen to double the cost of everything, 10-fold the debt whilst paying themselves massive dividends, we might as well be bought out by Thames Water.

Personally wouldn't care, completely get why many would be upset by it though.

Give me this over 90% of the owners we will likely be talking to/linked with. Best football network on earth bar none. Few risks involved with them obviously surrounding branding, but RBL would be so much better than some American Consortium that want to bleed everyone dry whilst creating eye watering debt and paying themselves handsomely.

1000000% a Brexit supporter

I can see what we are trying to do, and we had some nice patterns of play, but in the end we don't yet have the players capable of doing it, we can't finish for toffee, and we need to do it quicker. I saw RM visibly raging on a few occasions and it looked like the players were opting for the easy pass over risking anything, and in the end it just led to us being pressed back until we made a mistake, pretty much all of our mistakes were self inflicted. Style of play is obviously a big factor in this, but the players were awful.