JimJams

Oh dear....

2 now. Hopefully they all get a stomach bug for the weekend.

What swayed the board was a lack of options because we looked extremely unattractive with an unknown points deduction looming. If that was sorted before the Summer, we'd have had much more interesting options.

Needs more Ayew...

Saints got all 4 strikers on the bench, none start.

But who have we beaten?

Was said all last season.

Ipswich have only lost to Liverpool and Man City.

Ipswich 1 up...

I think the Premier League did it one year but the rest of Europe kept it open into the season, so it was a shit idea at the time.

Not sure Wolves have more match winners than us. I think Cunha and Hwang are their only decent proven goalscorers (both with a 12 goal peak last season). After that there's nobody really and currently Hwang doesn't even get in their starting 11. Brentford currently have Mbuemo because Wissa is out injured until around December, and they are their only source of goals this season. Thiago has been injured since signing and is an unknown. Bournemouth. Semenyo and Kluivert. Neither been near double figures before. I'm going on goalscorers here, so maybe you meant match winners elsewhere in terms of solid defenders or something but I don't think they've got 'much more match winners' than us at all.

Everyone is struggling to a certain degree.

He was. He just had a boring persona which doesn't help. I didn't feel sorry for Puel when he was booted, but I kind of felt that he was a little unlucky with it. I watched a lot more football back then and watched his Nice team try to do a Leicester before doing a Leicester was a thing. When he came to us you could see him trying to replicate that team setup. Maddison for Belhanda, Ricardo for, well, Ricardo and Tielemans was to be what Seri was for that Nice side, possibly the final piece of the jigsaw, but he didn't get to work with him really getting the boot 3 weeks after bringing him in. He also made some mistakes trying to replicate that Nice side. He moved Plea from a central striker into a wider position and played Balotelli through the middle, and I think he fancied doing the same with Vardy, but he never really got Vardy and that was a big part of his undoing. In terms of transfers, our 3 biggest moves under him were Maddison, Ricardo and Soyuncu. All 3 should have gone on to make us some serious money. Maddison didn't make great money cos of relegation, Ricardo cos of injury and Soyuncu cos of mismanagement. Youri was obviously a loan at that time, but we went on to sign him and he was yet another player we should have made bank on. So his top 4 signings if you like should have made us a small fortune if sold at the right times. After that Benkovic, Ward and Ghezzal. Worthless. Evans good, Diabate not good, but the fee was a dabble. On the transfer front I think he'd be seen as a success, potentially a great success if we made sales at the right times. In terms of the football it was poor, and I think that was down to him being overly reliant on the Seri type of player which Tielemans would have been, but he'd gone too long boring us to tears before he could make use of the Belgian. I think he made decent use of the transfer market, and wonder how he'd do as a DOF or even just chief scout rather than a manager.

https://www.skysports.com/football/port-vale-vs-swindon-town/508332 1.20

If he doesn't get 4 points from the Bournemouth game, it's time to go...

Do we think the supercomputer can give Cooper a virus?

I wonder how he feels about the Skipp challenge in the opening 10 minutes.

Especially when you see how Sanchez messed up on the 2nd goal against Brighton today. Fortunately Chelsea might have backed themselves into a corner with goalkeeper signings for now.

Tuchel wants it. He doesn't know it yet, but he wants it!

So when I said "if this was Fats debut season" it clearly negates the idea that they're not comparable. The point is that they are both performing poorly under Cooper. And out of the 2, Reid has performed at this level before, Fats has not. It's a perfectly legitimate point which you've turned into a player comparison when it's obviously not what was being said.

I clearly didn't.

I think it might be a tad unfair on any of the new lads to be expecting too much from them given who they're playing under. If this was Fats debut season we'd all be saying to send him back to Sporting given his start to this season. Wingers and fullbacks especially seem to be struggling under Cooper. So whilst at present, this is definitely an underwhelming beginning to his time with us, as it is with some of our other signings, it's still early and there's still (hopefully) a lot more to come from all of them. These players weren't particularly exciting signings, but they were decent squad additions at their former, established Prem sides, so should be able to bring that across to us. Though perhaps not under this gaffer.

So when we look at why people want Cooper out do we just look at a single game in isolation then? A game we lost by the way. Or do we look at the fact that we're 6 games in without a win. Or the fact we've only taken the lead in one game this season. Or the fact we offer literally nothing at all in an attacking sense until the opposition have scored and put the onus on us to stop sitting in all match? As well as the fact that although Pre-season results aren't particularly important, the patterns of play, or rather lack thereof were evident in those preseason defeats, games where we barely registered efforts on goal let alone goals themselves. And yet we've proven we can score goals. We've scored in every game. But we only do so when we have nothing to lose. So does that tell you something about the ability of the players compared to what they're being instructed to do? That perhaps we have the ability but we're being stifled by a manager who is more concerned about losing than he is about winning? If you play for a draw every game and get it wrong half the time you're a lot worse off in the long run than trying to play for a win every game and only getting it right 25% of the time. And Cooper is trying the former.

Or they both under performed under a manager who is making that a trend amongst our players.

Well it's blue at the minute unfortunately.