adam95581

‘Financial difficulties’ isn’t wrong though. We don’t have the headroom from a salary / FFP perspective to bring in more players.

Penalty saves aside, how did Iversen do?

In fairness, remove all the stuff about whether he is going to be our manager for much longer, we need a win to kickstart our season. I probably wouldn’t put a load of 18-20 year olds in to play against an EPL team if my job was on the line either.

Stupid mistakes aside, Ward has made some decent saves. Clearly one of the key differences between a #1 and #2 is consistency.

Have we got an away kit yet?

If we were selling him for £25m when he had 3 years left on his contract clubs would be all over it. But £25m seems expensive when he could be available for £0 in a year.

I bloody hope so. Selling him to PSG would be so much more bearable than Chelsea. There are just some clubs that are so easy to dislike and they’re one of them.

Although I think this is b******s and we’ll be fine, the concern for me is that if we don’t get off to a good start then it gathers momentum and perpetuates a bad feeling around the club

If we were getting those two I’d still want £40m+ for him. Neither has proven they can do it regularly in the prem.

That assumes we really wanted him though..

Well it is true. If Fofana doesn’t get injured at the end of pre-season then we 100% do not buy Vestegaard. As for it being a terrible buy, I have pretty much said that. We should have bought someone with a profile that is more aligned to our usual targets and certainly one that was a better fit with our style of play. It was a panic buy as we were not prepared and had to react to the Fofana injury.

In hindsight, I think we were guilty of not proactively monitoring players of the right profile. Fofana was injured right before the season had started and after we had done our main transfer business which meant we had to dip back in. Not having your first choice CB pairing for the majority of the season is a bit of a crisis. As for having a £15m defender on the bench, Vestegaard wasn’t bought through choice but rather through necessity. We would have been better off buying a younger player in the mould of Fofana / Soyuncu (eg. Mobile, athletic) as he just doesn’t fit our style at all.

Fixed it for you 😉 In all seriousness, it shows how much we miss Vardy when he’s not in the team (and how much of a problem we have coming over the hill…) Even Daka’s cameo (which wasn’t bad) shows the difference between the two of them. Daka did well to win the ball back for the 5th but was outmuscled 2 or 3 times. Apart from how clinical JV can be, he just causes so many problems for defenders (especially ones of Cathcart’s standard..)

He’s not English

Controversial view. Rodgers has tried zonal, tried man to man, brought everyone back, left 3 up. At what point do we accept that we’ve got a bunch of players that don’t have the desire / balls to own it and take accountability.

I was still Rodgers in until recently but a few things have made me change my mind. 1) lack of urgency - we’ve had this issue for months but it really became evident against Roma. We’re too slow in possession and look to go back almost by default. It must be a result of us looking to ‘control’ games which is classic Rodgers. However, in midweek, it meant that we couldn’t switch the tempo. We couldn’t mount any sustained pressure and from about 60 mins it was obvious what was going to happen 2) corners / set pieces - personnel will always come into it with this one, but his reluctance to move away from zonal marking earlier in the season cost us so many points and that was on him. Since then it has been an area that teams have focused on and exploited because they’ve know it to be a weakness 3) use of Iheanacho and Daka - Daka can’t play up top on his own and Nacho is one of the most productive players in the league but has barely featured for any prolonged periods. Why has he not found a way to use them together and get the most out of them 4) Maddison as a right winger - we lose so much from our most effective player (of late) when we stick him out on the right. He doesn’t have the pace for it. When we’ve played him in the middle (Roma for a period) we actually look like we might threaten Conclusion: time to go

Yeah this does my head in. We have a team full of babies who don’t want to get hit and have no fight. No wonder no one puts their head on anything. So over it.

I’m more annoyed with Everton winning than us losing

Why are we always so weak in the tackle

One of the most unlikeable players in the league

It’s got to the point that we concede from a set piece before the commentator can even relay the stat about how many set pieces we concede from.

Not sure I agree. I think we do lack aggression in both boxes and Liverpool v Tottenham yesterday really brought that home. The way Konate and VVD attacked the corners was like nothing I’ve seen from any of our players this season. Re the set up (and I made this point in ‘Ricky marking Abraham’ thread). There was always going to be a mismatch as they had 3CBs to our 2 plus a striker who was 6’4”, whilst we only had 3 outfield players over 6ft.

I was thinking about this last night. They were playing a back 3, we were playing a back 4. That means they had one more CB than us anyway. Their striker is also 6’3” whereas I am not sure if we had anyone other than our CBs over 6’1” Someone is going to tell me I’ve got some of the heights wrong but the point is that there was always going to be a mismatch somewhere. I think the mistake was not having that mismatch set for the players at the edge of the box. As a smaller player it’s far easier to beat your opponent if you can stop them running than it is to beat them from a straight 1v1 standing jump

Season over, Everton need to win. 3-0 Leicester.

Worst refereeing performance I’ve ever seen. Just shocking. However, failing to have any sustained pressure at any point in the game despite going behind early on and knowing we had it all to do is absolutely criminal