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Thought he was very good, did everything required of him and looked assured rather than rusty despite his inexplicable absence from the team/squad all this time. I remember Vestergaard and Fatawu putting him in a couple of particularly sticky situations which he dealt with admirably. No surprise to anyone except presumably Cifuentes and the usual contrarians.

Shades of Col City Fan when he wouldn't admit he didn't know what a cult hero was

I've a degree of sympathy for anyone playing up front in this wretched team but so far it's like we've found a way to combine the worst attributes of the other two strikers into one player

We were genuinely dreadful, again. No ambition whatsoever to get a second or even try to keep hold of the ball, even against ten men at the end. Not sure I'd say Boro deserved to score an equaliser necessarily because they weren't much better but we definitely deserved to concede one.

Did he? Granted I wasn't exactly glued to it but it looked very much like the usual 4-2-3-1 with Okoli at right back and Ayew plodding about towards the left. His idea of changing things up seems to be plugging different combinations of players into the exact same shape that week after week sees us create virtually nothing.

I'm under no illusions whatsoever that sacking him actually solves that many of our problems but the guy is a complete fanny. Lifeless football, crap results - off you ****.

We're so back

I think there is probably a similar thing going on to what's been happening at Man Utd over the past however many years, where the environment has just been so suffocatingly bad that as soon as a player leaves you can all but see the weight being lifted from their shoulders. When so many signings fail and so many players not only don't improve but actually get worse the longer they spend here, it goes beyond just bad recruitment or bad management for me.

It is simplistic yes, that's what I mean. Standards at a football club are important - see what's happening to us in the absence of any - but I don't really think the way you set and maintain them is by simply identifying and signing Leaders and then having them Lead.

Particularly given "leadership" is a bit of a nebulous concept and I'm pretty sure what a lot of people mean when they talk about "leaders" is players who shout a lot and show higher than average levels of pashun. Funny seeing the thread about losing Morgan because when he was here there were always complaints about him not being a good captain because he wasn't constantly screaming at people.

The closest thing we have to a coherent strategy is to just always do whatever requires the least thought or effort, so I assume that in most cases the deal basically arrives fully formed courtesy of an agent or because the manager knows someone who knows someone who owes someone a favour, then we add 25-50% to whatever the asking price/wage demands are to keep them sweet. Only if there's no such oven-ready deal on the table do we then actually get the recruitment team involved.

With some of these you could at least see the logic at the time and they've just turned out disastrously for whatever reason, whereas there is no hindsight required whatsoever for Skipp. There can't have been more than about five people on the planet who thought spending that amount of money on him was a good idea but unfortunately that number includes the people at our club with the ability to make it happen.

Enzo I miss u

Looks that way. For a while I thought we were destined to be the new Stoke or Swansea, formerly "established" Premier League team now treading water in the Championship for the foreseeable - that's beginning to feel optimistic. While the squad gets worse year on year and the same failures are allowed to keep on failing without any suggestion whatsoever of accountability or repurcussions, hard to see how the current trajectory doesn't continue.

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