shen

I had Mavididi ask me to renew his contract with another 2½ years to run saying he's a different player to when he signed it. I declined and he and the squad were completely in uproar about it! Just had one of the most ridiculous matches in my entire FM career just now though:

Lucky you, could only get rid of Soumaré and Winks on permanents. No interest in Ayew, Daka, Kristiansen or Skipp. Faes out on loan.

The counter argument is that people were quick to discard Schmeichel and his proven ability for a guy in his late 20s who'd never proven himself above Championship level. Had Ayew been injured in the summer, I'm sure a lot would have believed him to be good enough at this level, especially with him having scored a handful of goals in an exceptionally poor team in the PL.

My point still stands - criticise him for things you disagree with, sure, but don't do yourself the disservice of killing his character. That's the kind of rhetoric that serves no-one.

You seem to forget people wanting to give Ward a chance when Schmeichel had a subpar patch. Some even suggested he was better than Kasper.

Nah it's just bandwagon-y snide and over the top stuff. I'm not at all convinced Marti can get any tune out of this squad, but I'm not going to criticism him for a decision I agree with, even if it's very late.

For the record I think that too, but... He won so many fans at Huddersfield, didn't he? Just like Page did at the start of the season. Don't pretend our fans won't jump on our youth players when they have poor games.

Yeah you don't have to hammer it out, I know exactly what you're opinion is from your initial post. It's stupid to say he wishes for Nelson to be injured, when he's selected him to play.

You're looking at it from the wrong way around. FT likes players better the less they play.

Come off it. He's playing Nelson isn't he? The guy can't win whatever he does.

Nelson twisted his ankle it seems. I played this match on FM26 last night and we won 2-3 from 2-0 down. Obviously a good omen

He obviously wasn't poor at Copenhagen. But his price was far, far too high. If we had spent €4-5m for him, people would maybe have felt he was worth the gamble. But this place was already toxic when he joined, and it's only gotten worse. It's a shame we couldn't shift him when his stock was still fairly high, but he (and we) are victims of FFP here - making the price we paid completely unacceptable.

The outcry is way over the top, but the FM community at large has always been quite conservative. That said, I understand the negative outpouring to a degree, especially given last year's major feckup and the clearly rushed and unfinished product this time around. It is frankly bewildering how they thought this game would be ready a year ago when looking at it's current state. Did they have to start all over or what? To me, the disappointment is more the mostly worse UI and the samey gameplay experience. I believe the last version I got was FM21 and it's virtually the same, but skinned differently. The matches look better, but it's still full of janky or inane stuff, like defenders running away from the ball. Some features have been made worse or harder to find, but I assume this will be smoothed out eventually. I'll play it a bit but realistically this is a beta test for FM27.

Tbf, Midtjylland probably have their best ever team in the strongest form right now. Celtic's problems haven't vanished just because MON took over. Franculino Dju will become the most expensive transfer out of Denmark, I'm sure of it.

He looked like he was about to explode

Yeah, I know the feeling. Have plenty of games I have started and never finished or that just require me to sit down with them to get going. But as a family dad with small kids I honestly don't have the hunger anymore and just go for the comfort games. That said, I want to go back to games like Dune: Spice Wars (RTS with 4X elements) and Against the Storm both of which are games with scenarios that can be finished in one or two sessions. I tend to find those kind of games find a sweet spot between slower, long form kind of gameplay (which I prefer) but cut up into digestible chunks.

Do you enjoy 4X games?

Not sure it really matters? The way it's sequenced probably worsens the feeling you and others have described.

Indeed, xG is just a more defined term than 'half-chance', 'guilt-edged chance', 'pop at goal' and all those descriptive terms. It's really just attempting to narrow down and describe in more detail what our eyes see. But there will never be an accurate representation because there are too many factors in play. You could argue that an xG in the PL isn't the same as an xG in the Championship or lower down the leagues, or even across the continent. Pitches, balls, player quality, weather, etc will be different, so it will always be an approximation at best - but it's still a far more useful and reliable metric than Shots/on Target which was all we had before.

It certainly requires some pragmatism. It's very poor that Cifuentes can neither make us solid or capable of creating chances with players of the calibre of Mavididi, Fatawu, Winks, James, Ramsey and Pereira and a super talent like Monga. I absolutely believe other managers can do better than he has.

Is it too much to ask the manager to actually get performances out of this squad? One win and two defeats in 8 games in this league is relegation-like form. That is much worse than what this squad is capable of.

There's no single factor to the malaise. But years of mismanagement is definitely key here. Are any of our most recent manager's blameless? No. But people need a scapegoat and Cifuentes cannot get a tune out our squad, which admittedly is the worst it's been for a decade or more.

Soyuncu on the bench for Fener too

He has to do something a bit more drastic now. The home draws against Wrexham, Portsmouth and loss now at Hull have alarm bells ringing. He cannot keep scolding the performances and not let it have consequences. He's better served trying to implement some of the youth, albeit I don't mind if he does it gradually. It's bizarre how Nelson, Page, Aluko, Thomas and Evans have completely fallen out of contention. If Vestergaard is 'good enough' can we somehow still accommodate Nelson? Maybe use Nelson a bit like Doyle under Maresca? We've persisted with Thomas long enough.