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The Leeds team he finished 9th with was, with one or two exceptions, pretty ****ing rubbish. Luke Ayling and Stuart Dallas played every game and he got Patrick Bamford scoring as many goals as Son. As far as I can tell his success at Leeds was based largely on his ability to get a pretty average squad playing way above their ability.

Yeah I wasn't hugely optimistic but even compared to my relatively low expectations I think it looks properly crap, which is a shame because in theory it ought to be exactly my sort of thing. Maybe it improves the more time you spend with it but the writing, particularly where the companions are concerned, seems so lifeless and bland which for a story-focused RPG is a dealbreaker for me in a way something like wonky combat isn't.

Yeah I thought sacking Ronaldo off was one of the few good decisions he made during his tenure

Unable to sustain a performance sounds very familiar but finish we can definitely do. Man Utd are the biggest underperformers on xG whereas we are the biggest overperformers, and the stat that we're the only team other than Man City to have scored in every game is even more remarkable given how few chances we create and shots we take - we are lowest and joint-lowest for shots on target/90 and shots/90 respectively.

There are quite a few crap teams in the league and obviously it's relatively early days but I have a strong suspicion all three promoted sides are going to drop again (has this ever happened twice in a row?). Ipswich I just don't think have a very good squad at all, Southampton are Southampton and though I think we have enough quality about us to keep our heads above water it would be no surprise whatsoever to see us sleepwalk into another irrecoverable situation as we did with Rodgers. Everton simply can not and will not ever get relegated and the sooner we all make our peace with that the better. Wolves are crap but you would expect to pick up after a very difficult start. Palace and West Ham are no great shakes either but both have good enough managers that I think they will be fine and Forest look alarmingly solid.

He could but that would have meant turning down another crack at European football and the opportunity to reunite with the manager under whom he'd just had his best ever season, so I think it would be unfair to say the only possible motivation for choosing Chelsea is money. The impression I got was that he was not in any great hurry to leave regardless of the destination.

It was about the money yeah but primarily for us rather than him

We seem to have ended up with the worst of both worlds in that Cooper is a defence-first coach who doesn't actually appear to be any good at coaching a defence. I don't think we need some kind of miracle worker who's going to dramatically improve us across the board - if we had either someone who could make us more difficult to break down or someone who was capable of harnessing the attacking players we've got, we'd probably be OK.

On the plus side, we are almost at the magic 10 game mark where the consensus seemed to be that it suddenly becomes acceptable to sack someone

However slim the current pool of candidates is, it will be slimmer still after another month or two of Cooper working his magic. It might not be the plummest of jobs but I'm fairly confident it is a big enough draw that we could reasonably expect to improve on the present incumbent, provided we don't wait so long that whoever arrives does so needing to perform a miracle.

The bit I don't get - if you think the squad is shit then fine but surely in that case you would be even more keen to have a manager capable of elevating them above that level? The argument seems to be the players aren't good enough to stay in the league on their own merit so we might as well stick with our crap manager and make it even less likely.

This second half and in particular the complete lack of any positive response after conceding is enormously concerning given one of Cooper's apparent plus points is that he's instilled fight in the team and we're always in games. It could quite easily have been twice as bad and we could have had absolutely no complaints.

Nah of course not. I am well and truly resigned to seeing quite a lot more of this season slip away with him in charge.

Right how has he scored that then

If you're wanting to apportion blame for the goal I'm not sure you need to look that far back given Buonanotte tries to skin someone on the edge of his own box and then Justin shanks it straight to their player

It's such a weird game, pretty much everyone on the pitch looks absolutely ****ed

And now, your Leicester City side Smichael De Leat Wesolowski Macguire Castange Ghazzel N'didi Preat Gallacher Ineacho Woods

He gets through a fair amount of tackles and defensive work but yeah I think his work rate is being overstated in some quarters. I certainly don't think he's noticeably more impressive without the ball than Buonanotte, Fatawu or Mavididi who are all younger, fitter and a lot more capable with the ball than he is. He has his qualities, is good for the occasional goal and there are some situations he is ideal to bring into but I really can't see any reason for him to be even a semi-regular starter.

If I were a Palace fan I suspect I'd grow quite tired of watching Eze and Nketiah taking it in turns to shoot from 30 yards every other minute

That is fine and I think most sane people accept we aren't going to be swashbuckling our way to the European places but pragmatism is not necessarily synonymous with being defensive and grinding out ugly results. It means using the tools you have in the way that makes the most sense and I do not think that's what he's doing. I want us to play more expansively and give more chances to our creative attacking players like Fatawu not for entertainment's sake (or because in my subjective opinion it's the right way to play or whatever) but because we see basically every game that is when we are at our best.

About due another international break aren't we? Please?

Might want to let him know then, they'll be wondering why he hasn't been turning up to training

Who is Iversen on loan to?

Being able to produce a list of realistic replacements isn't a prerequisite for wanting Cooper - or any manager - gone though. I am a humble football fan who thinks Cooper is shit, not a director of football with a big contact book and the resources of a Premier League club at my disposal. It's a bit like how in January '23 I didn't have a big long list of quality goalkeepers who I was confident would sign for us, yet I think it would have been pretty reasonable of me to say I wanted us to sack Ward off and get someone better in. I think you are completely right in your previous post in that almost all of us would happily take finishing 15th - my concern is that I don't think our current level of performance extrapolated over the course of the season sees us finishing that high, nor have I been given any reason to believe that level is going to increase to any significant degree.

I can't personally give any advice on emulation but I know EmuDeck is meant to make installing and setting up emulators easy. Moonlight and Chiaki work very well for streaming from PC and PS5 respectively. For general use I would say Decky Loader and then any plugins you like the sound of - I would recommend ProtonDB badges as they're usually a better indicator of performance/functionality than the Steam Verified badges