Tielemans63

....but not better than Harry Souttar? Interesting.....

Any chance Ruud is mates with Pep Lijnders? Just been sacked by Salzburg. I'm guessing as they're both Dutch, they must be best friends or neighbours, or something.

I see the Congerton effect is now impacting on Atalanta. Ben Godfrey is rubbish.

We're quite fortunate that there are some truly shite teams in the league this season

Embarrassing from Cucurella, he's such a ****. Bankes falling for it hook, line and sinker of course. *glad he's been sent off, the diving twat.

They train with him everyday, and they each have a pair of eyes, so you'd imagine they've seen for themselves how vastly inferior he is to Mads.

Yeah, I do agree. When we were first linked with him I said I thought he was a top-end championship player. £25m when funds are limited was pretty terrible business. Again.

Yeah, I agree with this. The sort of player who is most effective when allowing more talented players to do their thing. Bit of a water-carrier type of player. Put him in midfield with Hamza and you've got a major problem.

Said it in the D***y W**d thread, Mads gives the team confidence and allows us to take some risks as he's such a good keeper. We can leave a few things to chance. The players lost all confidence the second Ward came on yesterday. Let's be honest, anyone who has played at a decent level will have been in a game when a sub has come on and you're thinking 'This guy is shit. We're going to struggle with him on the pitch.' I'm sure that's what happened on Saturday. You saw the confidence in the defence just evaporate instantly. Maybe they shouldn't think that way, but it's human nature to lose a bit of belief when arguably your best player gets injured and arguably your worst player replaces him.

Can't quite believe how bad Man City have been.

Hopefully a clueless backroom member of staff will manage the game and pick some frankly mind-boggling tactics - I've seen it happen somewhere before.

RvN wasn't my first choice to be fair, I just felt that he didn't really have the experience of this end of the league. That said, 4 points from his first 3 games is decent. We've taken a pumping today, but his options were so limited: he has to play JJ every week and the midfield options he has available today were a joke, quite frankly. Something I've seen that I like is that he's prepared to take risks (West Ham / Brighton) which I think is crucial if we're going to survive. Cooper was totally risk-averse which I'm convinced would have been our undoing over the whole season. I sense with RvN that we'll take risks and might take a few hammerings as a result, but we might also gamble and pick up a few points here and there. I don't mind that. All of this is academic though, if he's not backed massively in January. If we're still in a situation where we only have 3 half-realistic full back options, Skipp and Choudhury as our midfield options, Ward in goal and a 38 year old Vardy as our only effective forward, then it doesn't make a difference who the manager is. My concern is that January is a notoriously difficult window to operate in and we're relying on Rudkin and co to get deals done......hard to conclude that we're anything other than knackered tbh

I'm pretty indifferent towards VK, but I don't think he can be blamed entirely for yesterday. Could be wrong of course, but it seemed like he was asked to tuck in and make a 3 (a tactic Cooper used a lot ) wherever possible. I think the logic may have been that Jacob Murphy's shot conversion ratio is pretty poor, so it was a gamble (that massively backfired) to allow him to have the ball so we could double-up on Isak, the clear danger man. It looked to me like VK ended up having to cover two positions, and inevitably it didn't go well as Murphy had a stormer. Maybe I'm way off, but I suspect it was a tactical risk that didn't pay off at all. Might explain why he never seemed quite sure where he should be positioned. He's supporting as an extra CB while their RW is absolutely running the show. I think he was stuck between a rock and a hard place, to be fair to him.

Vardy BEK Buonanotte I also think Ndidi playing his best position could be a factor Like @StanSPwas just saying

I have just done this, and you have to go back 5 pages to get to any positive comments, and that was when we were in the Championship. He wasn't a regular pick at the level below. I do agree that he can't go straight in to an away game at Newcastle and hold his own; but that's the whole point isn't it? He's nowhere near good enough to do a job in the Premier League.

It is. Signed a 4 year deal in 2021.

'Good with his feet'

Ah shit. We're ****ed if Mads is injured. It really doesn't matter if Iversen's footwork is poor, we need a good shot stopper right now, as it's the Alamo every game. It's not like Ward is Neuer with his feet either.

Ndidi was injured and Soumare banned. Neither an option today, mate

Don't think some people get it; Ward might not have been directly responsible for all 3 goals, the glaring issue is that the team have about as much faith in him as the supporters do. The team fell to pieces, literally the minute he came on. Mads gives them a level of confidence as he's quality, the team clearly have no faith in Ward, what more evidence do you need?

We were trash today, however, ref does his job properly rather than being a total fanny, and it may have been a different game. Bruno should have been gone before HT.

Great decision to give him a new 4 year deal last year 👍