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He's ****ing crap. I can't get particularly enthusiastic about calling for his head because the players and his superiors are also ****ing crap but, regrettably, we can't realistically sack the whole squad or the board, and if we don't change something I'm increasingly confident we're going to be in deep shit even without a points deduction. The team is getting worse with every game that passes and the rest of the division seems to have finally worked out they've got absolutely nothing to be afraid of when they play us. The same low-risk, no-reward football every week, the likes of Nelson, Aluko and Evans not even making the squad while the players in their positions drop stinker after stinker. What positive effect is he actually having on the club? Of course the depressing thing is that you know it'd be Martin/Carrick/O'Neil replacing him but I've never thought the "yes he's doing a bad job but the next person might do a worse one" defence of a manager is a compelling one.

For some reason a moment that always comes to mind for me is Rodgers bringing on Lewis Brunt at left back in the 22/23 loss at Forest - symbolic of a manager and ownership who had given up even pretending to care

Disappointing, must be a real gut punch for him personally having not long returned from another bad injury. Even through fitness and suspension you could see glimpses of how talented he is and his two goals were both excellent in very different ways. Shame Page is away but realistically he'd probably remain locked up in the dungeon with Nelson anyway. No real reason to believe we'll change shape so I expect either James labouring out of position or Ayew parked in our half trying to win free kicks for 90 minutes.

Edouard has never been a particularly good Premier League striker beyond his debut for Palace but I did still think it was still a little weird that he didn't get any chance whatsoever when the team literally could not score a goal. If he couldn't be arsed and was just pissing about during the week then fair enough but Percy reported that he'd been professional in training throughout. £2.5m loan fee and "a hefty portion" of his 90k a week wages for the guy to play less than half an hour in the league, it really is impressive stuff.

I'm increasingly of this mind too. You think about the essentials you want in a centre back, then you think about which of them he's actually good at, there's basically no overlap. I don't usually like the shouts to move players around the pitch (Barnes to striker, Ndidi to centre back etc.) but anything that gets him further away from our box is worth serious consideration.

xG tries to measure how likely a shot is to result in a goal, based on a load of different factors like where it was taken from, what sort of pass preceded it, where the defenders/keeper were and so on. If you've got a tap-in on the line under no pressure whatsoever, that shot's got a very high xG, whereas if you're shooting from miles out or the angle is basically impossible, that shot will have a very low xG. We will all have looked at chances and thought "he should really score that", "he could shoot a hundred times from there and it'd only go in once" - xG is just putting a number on it. I think a lot of people instinctively take against it because they see the name and conclude that it's somehow trying to predict how many goals are going to be scored ahead of time - if it were called something like "chance quality" then people would probably be more accepting.

Liam Delap seems like an absolute helmet and not a very clever one to boot. Don't think I've seen him play without him acting the big man and basically just trying to hurt people

It was on the BBC News at Ten last night, which is a fact you can verify yourself on the iPlayer

To repeat something I said in another thread, the quality of "chances" we "create" is abysmal - joint-bottom with Swansea for xG per shot and only QPR and Watford have a higher average shot distance. Interestingly (?) we are top and third for passes into the final third and into the opposition area respectively, but if I were to guess, these passes are almost always played a) after the opposition has had ample time to get bodies behind the ball and b) to players who are consequently double/triple marked and get no support in terms of overlapping or underlapping runs. Some player-specific stuff that I don't think has been mentioned: Fatawu is miles clear on successful take-ons and also leads on progressive carries, progressive passes received and passes into the penalty area. James is top for us and 8th in the division for key passes despite playing less than 500 minutes. Wout Faes has an aerial duel win rate of 35.7%.

There's shots and there's chances though. Four of our shots against Millwall were from 30 yards or further - are they particularly good chances to score? Our xG per shot is joint-lowest in the league and there are only two teams with a higher average shot distance. Shot accuracy we're above average and we're pretty much bang on in terms of goals compared to xG so it's not like we're massively wasteful or wayward in front of goal, we are just really bad at creating high-quality chances in a way that I'm sceptical signing a new striker will have a particularly big impact on.

No that's someone else, this is the one who thought his name was Rudd

Increasingly disappointed with him. Feels like worst of both worlds stuff where we're not good enough to get promoted but neither are we spending the season consolidating and looking to the future. Whether that would be any different with someone else in charge, who knows. Sort of irrelevant because I think we're stuck with him anyway - things will need to get much worse than this, and the individual quality in the squad is such that no matter how badly we're playing, we will probably still fluke enough results to keep him safe. Exciting!

Yeah I accept it's not quite the tap-in it looks when paused, and like most actions in football it's almost certainly a lot more difficult than it looks, but it is nonetheless a chance from about six yards about and he's missed the target despite watching the cross all the way onto his foot and being completely unmarked. It sort of looks like he hits it with his studs - the thing that stood out to me about him when he first broke through was his technique and composure. Not only has he not really developed at all physically, those qualities aren't really in evidence much these days either. Again, it's immaterial if either Bobby or Daka don't just stand there watching it, or if we created more chances and thus could afford to miss one or two. Still, I do fancy he should probably not put the ball wider of the goal than it is when he receives it.

Odsonne Edouard scores for Lens for the second game in a row to send them 4th, the one that got away

Someone should be alert to the possibility of it going across goal but I do personally think a professional footballer who's played in the Premier League and in Europe should probably be hitting the target on their strong foot from this position

Takes some doing that, we hardly ever draw

Not great. Yes we're 4th but we're as close on points to Portsmouth in 14th as we are to the autos and that's before any deductions. For all his soundbites about "fearless" attacking football, we make about one genuinely good chance a month and there are no perceptible patterns or ideas going forward other than try and keep the ball until we can get it to Fatawu and then hope he skins everyone and/or scores from 30 yards. Like others I would cut him more slack if he was braver with the young players and visibly trying to build something for the future but instead he's building on sand by not only throwing his lot in with proven failures but continuing to favour them while they let him down time after time. I don't think he's in any danger whatsoever of getting the sack though.

Disregard, he is dog poo

Ours isn't a great deal better to be fair

I'll go for Aztec

You can't tell me you don't have fond memories of Karlan Grant's goal-laden spell at Fulham

About half the players/goal numbers are incorrect. Unfortunately, if you're expecting people on this forum to put more thought and effort into their arguments than copy-pasting from ChatGPT and taking its hallucinations as the gospel truth, then you are going to be disappointed

No, not really. Cambridge dictionary: "something considered embarrassing or morally wrong". Maybe a pretty mild or euphemistic way of putting it - I think you'd normally use it for something like a politician having an affair rather than the sort of depraved stuff this freak was getting up to - but not inaccurate.

Was going through it in my head and ended up with a similar total if not exactly the same names. Perez I thought was an OK player but tough to get away from the price tag and the opportunity cost of therefore not signing a genuinely good right winger (or arguably a genuine right winger at all) instead, and Casadei I thought was probably the weakest of the three loan signings that season. Then in the other column, Cannon I probably wouldn't say was a good signing necessarily because he wasn't up to much but overall you'd probably have to say we did good business with him by ultimately making a profit on someone who scored two goals for us.

I was going to say, if all you want is the same game but with an updated database and a different look then there's no need to pay any money at all, let alone £40