theessexfox

Why did we buy Soumare?

Every single thing we did for the first 90 seconds was horrible

Not having random chips on their shoulders about a random island millions of miles away

Have you seen Jorginho take a pen? These guys are clearly able to pick up the cues from the goalkeepers’ movements and roll it the other way.

You’re always going to take someone who started every game in the last tournament where we got to the final and who is back in full training now, no complaints with that

He's 1/6 to go on SkyBet, anywhere to lay it?

It’s not great to watch but against a team that good, I’m not against staying in the game and making it a 15 minute mini-game at the end and chancing our luck. With an extra body up front and everyone pressing 10 yards higher after the change, we nicked the ball in good positions, built some momentum and got in some promising transitions, but lacked the quality and luck to execute on it. There’s no way we maintain that intensity and pressure for 90 minutes without getting pulled apart. Credit to us defensively too, many teams sit in against them and still get picked off, obviously helps not facing Haaland but we didn’t look too troubled on the whole.

You’d like to think that his presence at games is completely irrelevant for evaluating performance given the level of video evidence and analysis available, however I don’t really trust that this is the case with Southgate

My level of worry about the next few years, financially and from a squad building perspective is very strongly correlated to whether the rumour of an option to extend his contract is true. Do we know for sure if it’s up in 2024, or whether there is an option on the club’s side? Either way I think we’ll be lucky to keep hold of him beyond this season, but that extra year is a huge difference in bargaining power for a fee, as the Tielemans saga seems to suggest.

Seems like I’m in the minority but I thought we were generally poor and second best. I’ve been a bit disengaged this season and not able to see us much, and so I don’t really even have much of an anti Rodgers bias to be confirming, I just thought we were often poor and sloppy on the ball, easy to play through and coming off second best in a lot of tackles. I actually thought Leeds were energetic and good on the ball with lots of options, they just wasted a lot of good positions and gave the ball away cheaply in their own half too much. I didn’t find it overly encouraging but we obviously had good moments, generally defending okay and got a very important result, so that’s the main thing

Harry Kane doing lots of good things at the moment around mental health and school kids, he’s a great role model

Great player and great character, very lucky to have him

This country is ****ing bizarre

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15% sell-on clause for Norwich as well apparently so that’s closer to £30m - if the extra third year option is true then we don’t need to bat an eyelid for less than £80m at this stage

Part of me thinks we could tide over the season with Ward and Iversen, part of me thinks neither are up to the standards we need for our first team

Club legend, will be sad to see him go but may make sense for both parties now

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So difficult to contextualise what a phenomenal series of chases this has been, genuinely unprecedented - have been supported by some decks that have held up well on days 4+5, and some muddled third innings batting from NZ and India, but the composure and quality of these changes has been insane.

Prefer the post-Madonna's myself

Barnes definitely cheated on that penultimate one, how did he end up so far ahead of Madders?

He's on about £300k a week at PSG

We didn’t give a sh1t that Evans was awful in his last year at West Brom, likewise clubs will know that he’s a top player regardless of whether he phones it in this year. Bigger concern is whether he has the physicality to play in a top midfield which I suspect is the biggest limiting factor here