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Our only player to feature in every league game so far and started all of them to boot, still pretty young and not that long recovered from a very serious injury. If you're not going to give him a rest for a cup game against a bottom half League Two team then realistically when are you?

Two of my favourites to start the year, lovely. Really enjoyed that Viagra Boys album and the four new deluxe tracks are all great.

Yeah, for all that he's definitely improved I'm a little surprised by some of these comments. It's not really anything to do with the price, more that he's been here for something like 16 months and has been absolutely shit for all but about one of those. Nothing against him personally of course and if he can keep getting better then that'll be brilliant for both us and him, but I think it's a bit early for this "always rated him, where are the haters now????" stuff.

Obviously still incredibly grim stuff but I think "making" in this case means downloading it i.e. "making" a copy of it. While I have to imagine there's a reason it's referred to in that way, it does seem pretty misleading.

Fabianski would have been 40 at the end of last season wouldn't he?

Can't even run out of your goal and clobber an opponent while getting nowhere near the ball these days, game's gone

Yes it's an absolute masterstroke by the club as far as I'm concerned

That's odd because I'm sure I read that people with concerns about his fitness were just being negative for the sake of it, and now you're telling me he's not even managed to stay fit in training long enough for us to sign him? How strange.

Arsenal for me, just overall the best and most reliable team, particularly defensively. Maybe it's lingering memories of last season but I really don't trust this version of Man City. The only thing that stops Arsenal imo is Arsenal - I think at times under Arteta their desire to win spills over into desperation and becomes a hindrance, like when you sometimes get these games they're clearly good enough to win fairly easily but instead they seem determined to turn it into a grinding, attritional slog, almost as if to prove a point. Maybe nerves and/or self-consciousness will get the better of them but I'm not convinced Man City will maintain sufficient pressure for it to be of any consequence.

"It's not actually down to me, it's these other things you can't see that I can't tell you about" - ah fair play, carry on then mate. Part of me is optimistic that if he's getting cryptic and starting to make little digs at the fans it'll hasten his departure, and maybe that's his thinking too, but that doesn't account for just how little of a shit our board give. No point going all Enzo at Chelsea and trying to provoke the owner into sacking you when there's a good chance he doesn't even know we had a game tonight.

We're so back

Watched Slow Horses over the past month or so, enjoyed it. I do think it does the black comedy/drama aspects quite a lot better than the spy/action stuff though. I've no background in espionage myself (or have I???) but some of the fight and shootout scenes in particular are pretty ropey and at this point I reckon a good 80% of chase sequences have been resolved by Jackson Lamb anticipating exactly where the target is going to run to and then teleporting there. Nitpicking though and hopefully the next series is none the worse for the change in showrunner.

I know some people get very cross when xG or anything similar is mentioned but to reinforce how unimaginative and reliant on wondergoals we are, per FBref we've created 2 or more xG once in our 22 league games. That was on the opening day against a Sheffield Wednesday team who'd had a disaster pre-season, were a man down for the last 20 minutes and even without points deductions would be rock bottom and 12 points from safety. At the other end we've got the fourth-worst xG against and up until fairly recently Stolarczyk was outperforming every other keeper in the league for shot stopping - it's not like we're sacrificing attacking potency for the sake of defensive solidity, we're just ****ing crap and I think even a moderate points deduction of our own will be sufficient to have us bang in trouble. Mid-table results, bottom half performances and some people continue to be amazed by the suggestion it could be any better.

It would also presumably rule out ever signing any players because e.g. there's no guarantee that a new left back or centre back will be an improvement on Thomas or Faes, there's no guarantee that if we send Carranza back and get another loan in they'll be any better and so on. Same goes for a new director of football, chief exec, owner - everyone currently at the club really needs to stay here at least until the end of their contract but ideally until they retire or expire, because their replacements could be the same or worse. Not making changes when things are bad because you can't be absolutely 100% certain they'll get better as a result seems like a good way of making sure things don't get better.

Like the kid on the school playground who would always hog the ball, except usually they'd be doing that because they were better than everyone else, which this lumbering old oaf categorically isn't

We've certainly had worse and more outwardly unpleasant players but he might be the one I've enjoyed watching the least

I personally really doubt the players are particularly bothered, certainly not to the extent that it would materially affect their performances

I'd be very surprised to see him gone. Three losses on the spin and a run of one win in 10 didn't seem to put him in any real danger, so as poor as today was I can't see it being the end of him after the Derby and Ipswich wins. Despite everything, the squad has enough about it to pick up enough results like those that we are stuck with him for the foreseeable imo

Did well to react for the rebound in fairness to him

Usually I think "shouldn't get beat at your near post" is a lazy cliche - that fourth goal however is not ideal

Had he been cheap, he wouldn't have been as bad a signing. If we're just talking about how good he is as a player then I agree it's fair to take the price tag out of the equation - when we're talking about how good a signing is, value for money and thus the price tag is a pretty significant part of that.

I sort of hope we do sell Seagrave off purely to put an end to the inane arguments about how we got relegated and went down the pan because our facilities were somehow too good

Great idea. Wes Hoolahan in to provide competition at no.10 and Gareth Barry as a Winks replacement and we'll have had a great window imo

Divinity wooooo, hopefully not too long a wait for that although presumably they'll be doing early access again. Enjoyed Control so I'm up for another and though I've not really managed to get into the Warhammer Total Wars I'll be interested to see how 40k turns out.