Sly

If someone can be bothered to do the Foxestalk Gear End Awards, this gets my vote for post of the year.

https://footballleagueworld.co.uk/middlesbrough-leicester-citys-daniel-iversen-could-soften-michael-carricks-sol-brynn-blow/ Plenty of Chanpionship clubs would see him as a shrewd signing.

With his contract expiring in the summer, I’d imagine he’ll be out of the door come in January for a minimal fee.

Getting out of the Championship would be an absolute nightmare the following season.

It only takes a few injuries, someone having a spat for being refused a transfer etc. Football is a funny old game at times. I do think anyone can beat anyone in this league.

Chelsea have battered Ipswich. It’s not unlike our game against Bournemouth. Looking at the score doesn’t tell you the story of the match at all. We need some more games like this.

He’s better than Faes and Coady. However he’s still far from ideal. At least he wasn’t £25m like we wasted on Skipp.

I do think on current form, the bottom three clubs, the three clubs that came up, will be the three clubs to go down. However, still a lot of water to go under the bridge. We need to sign someone that had the impact Lingard did at West Ham and basically just carry us through games for the 2nd half of the season. Go and loan Messi from Miami!

£5m and he’s done a half decent job. Skipp and Okali are the sickening signings.

Ipswich were better than us last seasons for spells.

João Pereira Was in charge for 8 games. Losing 4 of them.

We’ll be at war with the EFL either way.

His numbers are decent, some Championship players go for silly money. It depends where he goes really. We needed to maybe loan him to somewhere like France, so he can score a hatful in a fairly prominent league and enhance his reputation. Similar to what Arsenal did with Balogun. The Championship standard is higher than most top tier Leagues in my opinion. It doesn’t get the showcase.

I think we need to throw everything at staying in this league. If that means selling him to get a starting right back, then so be it. We can figure out the centre forward bit next summer, when we know which league we are in.

What he has going for him is shooting accuracy. He shoots from everywhere though, so his conversion rate isn’t great for shots / goals. Coached under a lethal striker, who knows!

His conversion rate is similar to Daka. Different players but neither are ideal. We need somewhat that can maybe play like Ferminho did at Liverpool.

I’d imagine that’ll get rejected, as that’s low balling.

£10m - £15m?

We’d be better chucking PSR out the window and facing the punishment in the Premier League when we breach, rather than get relegated to the EFL. We need, to stay in this league come what may.

What are your usual, weird but delicious food combinations that shouldn’t go together!? We all know that person that dips their fries in a milkshake? How about Black pepper on strawberry’s? Sugar and butter on Yorkshire puddings? Nutella on Bacon? The classical crisp sandwich? Milk with coke? Dipping your toast in your tea? These aren’t mine by the way! We got into this discussion over Christmas Day evening! When my sister in law mixed Guacamole with Ice Cream! I do like a Walkers Crisp Sandwich though. What are yours?

I didn’t think he was too bad yesterday. Vardy was definitely offside when Ortega wiped him out. KDB should have been booked for a dive. Buonanotte should have been booked for a dive. El Khannous was late on Lewis, despite the fact he tried to pull out. He still went through him. Not every foul is a yellow card. The niggles here and there happen. We do them as well.

Underwhelming first half of the season. We have enough about us with the technical ability in the midfield to generate opportunities. We are a Vardy injury away from really struggling to put the ball in the net. I’ll give Daka more leeway than others but whilst he presses better than Vardy, he is better running into space. Something that Premier League teams rarely give you. The defence worries me, as we need to stop conceding. Our positional play and overall ability as a cohesive unit is about as fragile as a wet paper back. The 2024 summer recruitment of both players and staff was largely abysmal. Cooper wasn’t the right coach to take us into this season. We can play possession based football and we recruited poorly in the summer. We should have got in a coach with a similar philosophy to Maresca. Still not convinced RVN is the correct coach either by the way, however he needs time and transfer window. Injuries to key players is hurting us. Ricardo, Hermansen and Fatawu get into the team that lost yesterday. Hopefully we see Ricardo and Hermansen again this season. We need a minimal of 3 players in January. Two fullbacks that are comfortable on the ball and a centre back to partner Vestergaard. Coady is okay as a backup. Faes and Ndidi aren’t at the required level, so ideally we move them on in January to fund these signings. Skipp and Okali look to be a waste of £40m. El Khannous is a gem and hopefully he continues to grow. Coopers tactics nullified him. His partnership with Winks and Buonanotte worked well. Soumare has improved but still has lapses in concentration. If we could improve on him with another metronome player like Winks, we’d control the ball more in games. Skipp isn’t that player. Mavididi slows play down too much to try and do step overs. He doesn’t have the pace to get around players at this level like in the Championship, who also doesn’t give him the space. He needs to just go more direct as his end product isn’t bad, he generates opportunities. We just need more of them. We are within 10 points of mid table. So it’s far from over. We need to improve though as we can’t afford to lose to the teams around us. I think we’ll need 38ish points to stay up, as Southampton are going to have such a low points total. That’s 24 more points or an average of 1.26 points per game. Our last 5 games could be nail biting as we play: 26th April - Wolves away 3rd May - Southampton home 10th May - Forest away 18th May - Ipswich home 25th May - Bournemouth away Ideally I’d rather be playing teams that are maybe on the beach at that point!

Souttar will be out until the start of next season with a ATR injury I’d imagine.

Yes, as he’ll have played enough games. De Laet got a Premier League one with us in 15/16! He also got promoted with Middlesbrough from the Championship in the same season.

I assume Edouard has appearance fees linked to games and he will swiftly return to Crystal Palace on Wednesday.