Finnegan

How have they not scored

I thought I was going crazy

**** me a centre back that can win defensive headers. Did we mean to sign Lascelles?

Did their own player just clear it off our line

One man team. We'd probably be 24th without him. Ridiculous. Some hit.

WHO ELSE WOULD YOU PLAY???????????????? He's contributed more already, just by actually ****ing running, than Ayew has in weeks. We obviously weren't going to throw either the loan kids straight in, especially as neither are natural strikers.

Even the Birmingham comms think they got away with the pen

Decent chance that's a pen in the Prem.

We're going to need to a proper coach brought in ASAP. An actual firefighter. We need someone that can inspire some confidence and positivity in this lost urgently. Its not King is it.

I'm guessing we've lost the vast majority of the games we conceded first early. But we've probably drawn quite a lot of the games we scored early 1-1?

How many cheap goals have we conceded in the first ten minutes of games this year.

Who also isn't strictly a striker.

Can we please stop with these reactionary ****ing panic threads? We've got a thread for League One already which is, tbh, hopefully just over the top but after the points deduction it's probably worth leaving open. This is months premature and just makes you look like you need to touch some grass. Give it a rest for real.

A person being a PE teacher or not is irrelevant. You're right, it's a pointless observation. A person having an appropriate CV for the job they're applying for is not. The point is that Mourinho knew professional football inside out, had been in and around it since childhood and had worked as a coach for years before he was then picked up (aged 29) by one of the best managers in the world at the time, who then mentored him. Skubala's career to date (having never played the game at any significant level, even academy) is being a PE teacher who got in to football through youth coaching with a few academies, coaching England U18s, getting the Leeds U21 job and then being hired by Lincoln. He's had one job in professional football and whilst he's done it fairly well it would be an absolutely massive risk for us, in our current situation, to gamble everything on him.

Gary Megson is out of work...

It really annoys me when people say this. Mourinho was hired as an interpreter because he was already a coach. As a kid he came through the academy system of a top flight Portuguese club, tried to make it as a player, realised he wasn't good enough and gave up on playing to take up coaching instead. He started as a youth coach (again, at a top flight club in Portugal) and worked his way up. Oh and he was also the son of a professional, top flight footballer who knew the professional game inside out. He was already a recognised coach, that's why Robson hired him in the first place, he wanted someone that was multi-lingual AND a coach. This idea that Mourinho was just some nerd that spoke a few languages and he somehow stumbled upon being a genius manager is as ridiculously over-stated as the idea that Jamie Vardy suddenly went from pub football to the Premier League as if he hadn't spent his entire youth getting coached to be a pro in Sheffield Wednesday's academy.

I'd certainly take Smith over literally anyone else that I think has been even vaguely credibly linked. It'll be an unpopular opinion but I'd take Smith (who is probably more likely to bring Walsh with him than Nige at this point) over Pearson on his own.

I'm not not OK with Smith. He's fine I guess. Fairly underwhelming but we are where we are. The main reason it's horrifying isn't him individually, it's just that the most credible rumours seem to be imply we've considered a dreadful manager we've liked previously (Martin) and two former managers (Enzo and Smith.) The horrifying part is the simply staggering lack of any kind of creativity or footballing awareness at all. If they haven't previously managed Leicester or Southampton, we don't have a ****ing clue.

what the ****

Yeah exercise is phenomenal for your mental health. Not only are the endorphins and dopamine nice but your body has a number of calories that it's pretty much wired to burn in a day regardless of whether or not you exercise. If it doesn't use that energy in motion, it'll throw it to other "systems" in your body and can send them in to a kind of overdrive. This can include your threat response / defence mechanisms giving you added bouts of anxiety and stress, even if you don't normally struggle with those things. So yeah, even in the (mentally) healthiest people, neglecting exercise can be bad for you.

Not really. They're kinda doing it, that's part of the issue. The World Cup is next year and Ireland have a track record of peaking pre-world cup to an extent that's practically a meme. I think they're deliberately trying to work on this in advance, bringing in new faces and developing experience. Cultivating depth. I do think that a lot of defences have worked out how to defend against Ireland's style of attack and that their effectiveness is going to drop off a little unless they get back to the drawing board but the idea of them needing a whole new generation of players is a bit over the top. They have one of the best youth pathways in the world, certainly pound-for-pound given their population, they'll be fine. Plus, in fairness, France would have smashed pretty much everyone in the world last night, especially in that first half, they're an extremely good side and they were very, very up for it.

boomfa

Love Ramos. Basically the Vards of rugby.

Ridiculous