honeybradger

It's part of the problem with our wage structure, Vardy can point to players like Winks, Faes, Soumare etc who are on £80-90k a week who dont pull their weight and he is in every right to say he would be hard done by if he didn't earn more. At Cremonenese where everyone is earning £10k a week £30k a week suddenly seems a lot more reasonable. We need to get all the high earners out and reset our average wage to £10-20k a week with a team of young hungry players.

Similar to Maddison in that he is one of the few players who have shown any quality this season but is receiving the brunt of the backlash from fans due to his off field personality. Personally I like the fact that he actually cares and wants to be here, his decision making has been off this season but without his goals we would be staring down the barrel of a second consecutive relegation.

Braybrooke is actually improving every time he has stepped on the pitch this season. This loan has been massive for him considering how lost and out of confidence he looked in pre season, hopefully massive for us in the long term as he looks back on track for making it to our first team. All we need is Will Alves back fit and playing well and we could have the dream scenario of all three of Alves, Nelson and Braybrooke being key players for us next season in place of Winks, Cordova Reid, Faes.

We would be better off starting Soumare. Considering how well Winks started here it's a major indictment on how he has allowed his level to fall off. Hopefully we dont see him put on the shirt again.

Winks and Faes's last game for the club? A man can hope, it's all fallen apart since they returned to the starting XI. Two of the most disgraceful players we have ever had.

I'm not really bothered by who we have as a manager as long as our squad is filled with twats. Should have stuck with Van Nistelrooy, at least if he was still here Winks and Vestergaard and a few others would be gone by now.

This would make sense if Azaz was the only player that Aluko had to consider but he wasnt. Aluko moved away from Azaz before the pass was made because the passer faked passing to the other attacker behind him. It was good play from the opposition and there was nothing Aluko could do as he was marking two opposition players. If he sticks tight to Azaz the player behind him is open and scores easily, if he tries to gamble and predict the pass to the other player then that give Azaz space which is what happened. Either way Aluko was in a losing position, there was no right play there because he was outnumbered. It's hard enough to defend 1v1 but he had 2 players to consider so it was an impossible situation.

What did he do wrong if you dont mind me asking?

The sickening thing is that the club would probably renew his contract in a heartbeat if they could.

It wasnt bad at all. What is he supposed to do, he had been left as the last man covering 2 opposition players. The player on the ball played a convincing fake pass to the player on his right which Aluko understandably fell for then played a pass to Azaz on his left. You cant expect a player to be perfect when struggling to cover passes to two opposition players, he was at a disadvantage there, you would expect the opposition to score from that situation more often than not.

He wasnt that good under Cooper, was a dangerous dribbler but didn't have any end product.

In his prime he was shipping 9 to us and was bombed out of our squad a season and a half later for being crap under Rodgers. How he is still here is bewildering, even more bewildering is that Nelson couldnt play over these centrebacks for most of the season despite looking very assured when he came in.

He is so bad that despite the overwhelming negativity on this topic i dont think 90% of our fans understand how bad he actually is. Cant win a header, cant win a tackle, constantly out of position, regularly loses his man. He is genuinely in the bottom 10-20% of starting centre backs in this league yet you will still get some fans saying he gets into most teams.

Is there a case to play Brayrbooke in his position when he comes back from his loan? He might need some time to get settled but at least he has a future here and can put in a tackle unlike Winks.

Otchere starting to find his scoring boots at this level recently. Have been underwhelmed watching him in the past but it looks like he's made an improvement.

Well yeah, I dont think he looked completely out of his depth is what im saying and did well defensively for the most part. First yellow he was put into a bad position by sloppy play from Fatawu. It was either go for the foul or Southampton have a dangerous break, a more experienced player probably lets the opposition player break away but it's Aluko's debut so I can understand the pressure to not let the player get away from him. Not much he could do on the second goal, was defending 2v1 due to the horrorshow pairing of Faes and Vestergaard being out of the picture and the Southampton player pulling off a great fake pass. The second yellow was his only mistake in my opinion.

Apart from the silly yellows I thought he was ok. I thought Faes had a far worse game, no awareness on corners at all, and he will still be a regular for the rest of the season.

How did Aluko do with England u20s during international break? Don't think I heard anything about those games?

Im just saying that the games we had our best midfield starting havent always been great, such as milwall, wrexham or portsmouth, all of which started without Skipp or Soumare. It's not quite the golden bullet to success that it's made out to be.

To be fair the only game we've won starting with the Winks, James midfield is Swansea. On paper and on the eyes it's the best but something goes wrong more often than not.

I didn't personally think so, always preferred Bassey. Although I was surprised and impressed by how well Thomas played for us initially. I vaguely remember the U21 game before Thomas debuted for the first team he had a bit of a horror show where he assisted the opposition goal with a poorly placed backpass and I was surprised that he made the move up despite that performance.

We still prioritised Thomas at left back over Bassey. Im sure if we gave him a role in the first team whether at centreback or left back he would have stayed, it's just there wasnt a pathway for him.

You're completely right, if he didn't play the ball to the players in space he would get pelters probably but I reckon the team would have a higher chance of winning if he was more selfish and took a few more risks. Not an indictment on Sammy BTW but of the quality around him. If he was in a better team he would be doing the right thing but in a side like this with no quality around him he almost has to try and take some long range shots himself as he's one of the few with any quality.

It's a bit funny watching him in that Newport team because he's a possession minded player who beats the press and plays tidy passes round the pitch only for it all to be for nought as the teammate he passes to just plays it straight to the opposition or out of play. At some point i wish that he would just try and take the ball on and try and make something happen himself rather than doing the 'right play' and passing to the player who is supposedly in a better position but doesnt have the quality to make something of it.

Imagine reaching a point where we're disappointed that Reid isnt starting...