Sunbury Fox

Yep. Would have been justice if Blackburn had won tonight.

Anyone know the last time we won a 12.30 Saturday KO? Feels like we lose these every time.

I know he's become a joke figure but Martin's record in the Championship at both Swansea and Southampton is light years ahead of what Marti has achieved so far at QPR and with us.

Just checked Sofascore and discovered that Jakub and Begovic combined have prevented 5.5 goals over what would be expected. That is the highest of any team in the league.

These are beginning to pick up. Fear the worst again.

Assume there will be another 500 back up for sale after tonight’s “performance”.

Let it sink in that our starting XI tonight cost over £100m. Pretty sure that we also still have the highest wage bill in the league. It really is incompetence of the highest order that all of that investment has created such a shambolic team even in what is a really poor Championship this season.

I totally agree that Marti is a lower end Championship manager and his tactics tonight made no sense given Saints have been looking so good on the counter. But in terms of personnel, that back 4 sadly picked itself, given Okoli, Nelson, Souttar, Thomas and VK are all unavailable. We could have played Ricky P but it’s a huge risk to select him for 2 games in 4 days and in any case, much as I love him, he was probably our worst player against Stoke.

Only Mansfield, Notts County and Chesterfield to go!

Talk of play offs is totally unrealistic even without a points deduction, I think. On paper we should be doing a lot better but this group of players are so damaged mentally, so unconnected to the fans and so demotivated that anything more than hoping we limp to safety is unrealistic. The best case scenario is that Marti gets us to around 50 points after a points deduction - the sort of stuff he delivered 2 seasons running at QPR with a worse squad. We can then offload him and all of the many out of contract big earners next summer, allowing the new manager the financial headroom to build a brand new, hungry squad of players. The problem with this is that Top and Rudkin will still be here to oversee this rebuild, which gives scant hope it will be successful. How did it come to this?

2 offside goals and a foul in the build up to their other goal but let's face it Marti is so poor. Absolutely clueless to play a high line in this game when we've got Vesty in defence and you saw how devastating they were on the break at the weekend. Why didn't we sit in and look to hit them on the break, as we did in other games against weaker teams like Charlton and Boro? Was also ridiculous that he's not given Aluko a few minutes here and there before now, rather than throwing him into the team for a debut in what is likely to be one of our toughest away games this season? We've not had a single really good performance this season under his leadership. No players have improved. If anything, we're getting worse. His prior record suggested he would lead us to a bottom half finish and he's on track to deliver that.

Reckon this will make all STHs? I'm assuming not, given the size of the allocation.

The fact we should have buried them suggests we played pretty well against a team who are the runaway leaders. We just failed to finish our chances and their keeper played really well. The only time this season when we've really worked a keeper very often.

Quite surprised to see Birmingham at home popping up in this thread. We had only 5 shots (2 on target) all game in that one. So even fewer shots than in yesterday's game, which everyone is regarding as bang average at best.

Same. Scored 1 goal at the Kop end in the last 6 home games.

Cov at home was also largely decent. One of the few games where I've thought we were the better team on the day.

Pretty much a rerun of the Boro game, only we didn't concede a late equaliser. Classic Martiball really - awful in general play, bailed out by 2 quality goals from pretty much nowhere. This was a manager who said at 1 goal up his team would be going for more goals. Yeah right, Marti.

He's picked all of the fans' favourites today!

Saints coming into form just in time to play us.

Definitely more fun!

Got a problem with the car so haven't been able to drive up from London for this. Phew!

Genuinely astonished we've lost this so meekly in the end. At least expected a tense run chase for them. Imagine how many overs we'd have survived in the match if Cummins and Hazelwood had been playing - scary.

This has to be the quietest pre-match thread for a long time. A good demonstration of the current levels of apathy.

Vestergaard has many faults as a defender but let's not make out that he is not really good on the ball, especially in the Championship. And not all of his passes are simple 5 yard passes; he's really good at line breaking passes. The problem is that Marti is rinsing that as a tactic so other teams are now wise to it. If we used passes like this as a part of a variety of tactics they would be much more effective, as we saw under Enzo.

Now gets himself booked so misses the final qualifier on Tuesday. At least he'll be fresher for our game on Saturday.