Ricey

Getting so bored of Adidas, every home kit feels the same. That one is ok, but not a fan of the collar. The new HUGE Adidas logo looks ridiculous. It covers a bigger surface area than the badge. It should be symmetrical or, if not, the badge should take prominence. Both away kits look like GK kits.

Enzo needs to relax a bit in front of the media. He’s very guarded and I don’t think it does him any favours.

I’m going to use that next time I’m hanging out my arse. “Last night was…intense”.

We can’t spend within the current financial period due to the embargo, so any spending will have to be done in the 24/25 period, which will still be within the current PL PSR rules. As we’ve got a Championship season in there, we can only lose £85M for the three year period (22/23, 23/24 and 24/25) so we have no choice but to keep next seasons spending to a minimum if we want to avoid another breach.

For all those wanting to spend and effectively counteract the points deduction, you aren’t thinking about the fact that we have already breached for last season and, if we overspend this summer, we will breach again for this season and struggle not to breach again for the next couple of seasons. At some point we have to get our house in order and now is that time.

They have taken into account Forest’s EFL seasons as part of the three year period, so they can. I just don’t think they can issue points deductions for breaches that occurred in different leagues.

Logically it should be -6, regardless of what the Premier League propose. Their proposals so far have been laughable. Question is, if we do breach for this season, can the EFL touch us? Previously clubs like ourselves and Fulham have broken FFP en route to promotion and agreed a settlement with the EFL.

I think criticism of him over the last few months has been entirely justified and up until a few days a go most of this forum was incredibly critical of him. He's got a lot wrong recently, but last night that wasn't the case, which is why I was surprised that he made such a point of being overly critical of the performance. Maybe it was about keeping everyone grounded, but this isn't the first time he's done it when counter attacking has contributed to us winning a game. Anyway, regardless what he says in press, if we do deploy that kind of gameplan when required in the Premier League, everyone will be happy. Fingers crossed.

This is true, and he didn't try and calm things down in the second half when we went 2-0 up. The pressing and the intensity remained high.

I'm not looking to get at Enzo. I said that the performance was one that could start to change peoples minds, as it was outstanding. The aggressive pressing traps, the positionings of KDH/Wilf and the direct balls through the middle were clearly his plan and full credit to him for that. It worked magnificently. I just said that I'm worried by his comments. It was literally the first thing he said when analysing the match and he only seems to do it when we win without dominating possession. If he's happy with that style and he's happy to deploy it in the Premier League, then happy days. His comments post match cast doubt over that.

Exactly. Control is about so much more than just possession, which let's remember is based on total number of passes rather than percentage of time 'in possession'. Apart from the first 5 minutes or so after half time, I felt like we had control of that match. Far more so than some matches where we've have 60, 70+ percent possession.

This really worried me after the game. I came out of the stadium ready to change my mind a little on Enzo if that's the kind of game plan that we have up our sleeve, but his comments afterwards quickly washed that away. I took his comments as him being happy with the pressing, but unhappy that we didn't control the match more, i.e. that we didn't have enough possession. Yet I don't think we win that game 5-0 if we did manage to achieve 60%+ possession. We won the game 5-0 because we set traps for Southampton and punished them with our excellent pressing. It almost sounds like that wasn't what Enzo had in mind. It feels like he pours scorn on the most enjoyable performances of the season and bigs up the most passive and ineffective ones. He has an almost religious level belief in 'the idea'. It's not healthy and it will hold him back. He wasn't happy with how we looked after the ball, but for the love of god Enzo just embrace the chaos sometimes. We needed to be aggressive, we needed to transition quickly when we won the ball back and we needed to utilise the atmosphere. It was counter-attacking football but it was what was required. It was great to watch and it won us an absolutely huge match. It's also a style of play that we will have to adopt more often than not in the Premier League if we want to stay up, but I'm not sure if he'll let that happen.

Safe to say no one saw that coming. I knew we'd have some joy against them and I knew it was a good time to play them, but I didn't expect us destroy them like that. Our pressing was superb for most of the game and, other than a few attacks that broke down in the first half due to the too many touches, we were ruthless and clinical in front of goal. I appreciate that you can't play like that against a low block, but the higher level of pressing and aggressiveness seems to feed into mentality of the attacking players and cause them to be more ruthless, rather than overthink it. I wish we played like that more often, it's so much more fun to watch. Hopefully in the Premier League we'll have to.

Just been listening to the JJ Watt episode of Stick to Football and it's interesting that he said Burnley have changed their style over the last few weeks. I haven't seen them, so can't say I've noticed. "We definitely held that mentality for quite a while (sticking with the way they played in the Championship) but then we learned that it wasn't going to be successful, so we did have to switch it. Vincent is a first time manager and he's going through the PL for the first time as well. The way that we played in the Championship last season was so successful and dominant, so you think you add players to that and tweak it a little bit and then you go up and try in the PL, but you are coming up against sometimes 1 - 2 billion pound rosters and sometimes you literally don't have the ability...so we did switch it." They have only lost one in 7 since going a bit more direct. Like Burnley we'll have to rebuild our squad next season, but unlike Burnley we haven't dominated the Championship like they did and we may have to sell a couple of our best players to appease PSR. We'd be absolutely crazy to go up and try and play the way we are now. It would be suicide, but there is no doubt in my mind that Enzo will do it. He's said as much in interviews.

Is that Luke Thomas two yards below the defensive line?

I was on a flight last season against West Ham on the final day, taking off just after kick off and flying over Leicester. With every metre climbed into the air I could feel the anxiety drift away. Total, utter, blissful ignorance. Highly recommend.

Not sure where those stats are from but my app has Boro with an xG of 1.13 and Leeds with 2.47. No way did Leeds register an xG as low as 1.05 last night.

A draw isn’t a very good outcome, but it’s ok. It guarantees that we go into the Preston game in the top 2, even if Leeds and Ipswich win, which at least relieves some pressure on that match. Lose tonight and things go against us in the other matches and we’ll be 3rd going into the Preston match and I’d have zero faith that we can deal with that pressure.

…because linesman don’t have the benefit of freeze frames?

Watching Boro defend, if you can call it that, is painful.

Hermansen Justin Vestergaard Coady Choudhury Winks Dewsbury-Hall Ricardo Mavididi Fatawu Daka Faes has to be dropped. Justin's pace will be required, as this will almost certainly be another basketball game. I don't like Hamza at RB, but his aggression may disrupt their technical players. Ndidi has looked way off it recently, so I'd swap him for Ricardo who did brilliantly in that role away at Leeds. It has to be Daka up front. It won't be popular, but Vardy can't start two games in a few days, whilst Iheanacho and Cannon don't press well enough. Southampton, like us, hate being pressed high. We got so much joy from that at their place earlier in the season, as did Hull. Daka is by far and away our best pressing forward, so he has to start and then we pray that he remembers how to kick a football.

Hamza was inverting even out of possession which was really weird, especially when West Brom have dangerous wingers.

He had a few great moments, but he isn’t trustworthy and he isn’t a right back. He gave the ball away too much and charged so high in the press that it meant Fatawu was playing RB most of the game. Some charges worked, but too many didn’t and that massively contributed to how open we looked. He is a player capable of a few moments that get the crowd going, but I don’t trust him one bit.

A match that does little to change any of my opinions on him. We got opened up regularly, predominantly because Choudhury was pressing so high up the pitch and for some reason so was Vestergaard. It was chaos defensively. Choudhury had some vital moments, but on the whole he was very nervy and often out of position. And then there is the substitution situation. Yet again, far too late. He seems to wait until players are so tired that they can't press or make forward runs...and then keep them on for another 10 minutes. The subs he made were logical, just far too late again.

Faes needed to come out, regardless of what position he’s been moved into. Madness not to have Albrighton and Iheanacho on the bench to offer something a bit different.