orangecity23

Good to get a shithouse win, those 3 pts were desperately needed. This inverted Cooperball tactic of scoring first then being ultra conservative is a lot more sensible than regular flavour Cooperball where we start ultra conservative for 60-70 minutes, concede then have to desperately chase an equaliser or consolation goal at the end. Having Ayew centrally meant the team was a lot more balanced than normal, and although he didn't do anything offensively, he did bizarrely end up doing quite a lot of important defending at times. Both centre backs had great games, and Buonanotte was an absolute star, great goal, some superb covering of Justin at the back in the second half too, just all around great. Some of those subs were absolutely baffling though, all the booked players were left on (until Ayew came off eventually, then Soumare came on and immediately got booked ), no idea what the point of BdCR is when McAteer could be offering more. Maybe one glorious day we may see Stephy at LW, Buonanotte at 10 and Abdul at RW all at the same time. We all have to have dreams to keep us going.

What a dumb move by Bournemouth to win the toss and make us attack the kop first half instead of second. Confused our lads into thinking they are allowed to attack and score a goal.

Definitely agreed - the combination of Hermansen and Vardy's finishing vs Spurs and Palace, plus one snatched half chance by Stephy vs Everton (after Cooper decided early doors that he didn't even rate him and shouldn't start) are the only thing that got us the points we have. We could very easily be sat on 0 points now.

Because our DoF's idea of utilising his footballing contacts in a exhaustive search for the right candidate involves phoning the one agent he knows, getting turned down for Graham Potter again, then panicing and giving it the guy who lives round the corner from Seagrave - because he's been standing outside his office window with a sign saying "gis a job" and has agreed to go top of the training ground burglar alarm out of hours callout list and saved Jon a 30 minute drive at night sometimes if a Pigeon gets in the roof of the indoor training hall.

Even if they are concerned about Sustainability (which we all doubt given the clappers), they could have at least offered an alternative - like putting some of the details on the scoreboards at half time, or some announcements on the PA or something. Just making excuses because they don't want to say they don't care or can't be bothered.

Hmmm - seeing where we are in 4 games + a guarantee we would have been thrashed playing last seasons style. Next 4 games has Bournemouth and Southampton. Last season we beat Bournemouth in the cup with a largely reserve team playing, and thrashed Southampton twice. Lets see how this seasons "Style" of play (that gets outclassed by league 2 Walsall and has to hang on desperately for a 0-0) gets on in the equivalent fixtures. My prediction - badly.

Sounds about right, Cooper only allows us in the opposition final third once 60 minutes have gone and we are 1 or 2 goals down, so we only get near their goalline about a third of the time other teams get

That explains why Cooper didn't want him. Saw him miss one shot in training, then turned to his assistant and said "Did you see that? He just wasted almost 4 games worth of XG there!"

Training the match day teams of the future. Work experience kids on the cameras, 4ft 8, 12 year old lad in a sheepskin motty coat doing commentary.

We were 2-0 down against villa before the handbrake came off. It finished 2-1. Point being, we did nothing until Villa got their second and the game was over.

How strange. Turns out sitting there passively and letting villa have a 2-0 lead works out worse than actually trying to create all game, even if you are a newly promoted team. Don't Ipswich realise they used to be in League One?

I dunno - someone that invested in Boys II Men definitely sounds like someone who will bench Fatawu and Facundo for BDCR and Ayew.

Ask and ye shall receive. Nobody expected us to win today. Nobody expects us to win every game. Nobody expects us to win most of the games. Nobody expects us to finish in the European places. What would be a start, would be if we could win 1 game. Not aganst Arsenal, but against a team like Everton, with an injury crisis and in terrible form, at home. That would be nice. It would be nice if we could have beaten Crystal Palace once we somehow contrived to be in a 2-0 lead. But we won neither. What people might reasonably expect, if for us to have an attackinng threat when we are playing against Walsall in the Carabao cup. Walsall are a League 2 team, so compared to the likes of them, we are the Manchester City's of their world. And yet, we were comfortably outplayed and deserved to lose. Did you watch that game? In fact - how many of our games have you actually watched this season? I've watched plenty of games. So, funnily enough, I don't expect our players to be "optimal". In fact, I actually like a lot of our squad, and rate quite a few of them highly - because I've seen them play. I like Stephy Mavididi. I like Abdul Fatawu. I like Mads Hermansen. I already like Facundo Buononotte. I like Jamie Vardy. I like Ndidi, I like Winks, I'm already won over by Oliver Skipp and Okoli as well. So what I don't like, is when players like Mavididi and Fatawu, who are promising, and pacy, and carry an attacking threat are completely sidelined and treated like they don't belong at this level, to accomodate journeymen players like Ayew and BDCR, youu haven't done anything at this club to justify starting ahead of them YET. Not to say I think they should never start, but it would be reasonable to expect them to deliver a quality of performance off the bench to EARN their way into the lineup. Instead, they are parachuted straight in by a manager who has shown some very questionable judgement about the quality of his own players in every game this season. So onto the manager - now we have established that the level of expectation is to try to stay up this season - the question is do we BELIEVE that he can do it. Is their something to give us hope he can achieve that, and that he deserves our backing? Well, I may be a dumb mutt, but I'm pretty sure that our manager is currently standing on a record where he is on a run of 19 Premier League games without a win. That's half an entire season worth! In fact, his Premier League stats are currently 12 wins out of 61 games played. Now, If I apply my dumb mutt brain to that, I'm pretty sure that if we apply those stats to a Premier League game of 38 matches - that will lead to us winning 7 or 8 games all season. Which gets you 21-24 points, meaning we'd need to draw around 10-15 games to have a chance of avoiding relegation. Not an expectanation - a chance. Talking about teams to switch allegiance to, would you regard Nottingham Forest as team that have a perverse level of entitlement? They are a newly promoted team, that barely scraped survival (on the back of finishing juuuust ahead of the team with the 8th biggest wage bill in the country somehow getting themselves relegated), then last season, their expectation was to stay up. Not win the league or finish top half, just stay up, in a division containng 3 of the worst promoted teams the premier league has ever seen. That low level of expectation was not one that Steve Cooper could live up to, so they fired him and got Nuno Santo in. Who kept them up. We aren't demanding a top level manager - a Nuno Santo of our own would be adequate. Someone who could beat a 12 in 61 win record in the top flight (that's some distance worse than Frank Lampard managed at Everton for example, and nobody will give him a job at present). Someone who might win a game sometime this season, instead of continuing a half season long plus winless run. Now, I'm no tactical expert - but you may like to take a look at some of the tactical threads posted by the excellent Strider Hiryu, or check out some of his Youtube videos to get an understanding on Steve Coopers tactics (unless you've already seen us play plenty already this season) - to sum it up in a nutshell - the tactics have been bad. Really, really, really bad. So, lets end with some questions for you. Have you seen this Leicester City team play at all this season? Actually sat down and watched us play for 90 minutes? What are your level of expectations for this season? Do you expect to win any games at all this season? Would you expect us to win an away game this season? Do you rate any of our players at all? Did you see us play against Walsall? Would you expect to be able to beat a League 2 team away from home? Ultimately, the only reasonable expectation any of us should expect from Leicester City is that which we'd expect from a child on a school sports day. That they try their best. Give it the best go they can, to the best of their ability, so that at the end of the day, no matter how things turn out, they can hold their heads high and know they genuinely gave it their best go and can't have any regrets. If we go down, so be it. But if we go down, we should go down fighting. Currently, we are handicapping ourselves for more than half a game every week to put ourselves in a position where we have to scratch and claw to get anything out a match, because the manager is afraid to try. Afraid to have a go. Afraid to try to win a game, no matter what level of opponent is in front of us, even those from the bottom tier of English pro football. That's all on the manager, and unless he looks in the mirror and finds his courage, we will all be left disapointed at the end of the season, no matter what our expectations are.

We played these away from home in the cup last season, lined up with the likes of Albrighton, Praet, Coady, Yunus, Wanya, Stolarcyk and Hamza playing and won, playing front foot attacking football whenever we could. There is no excuse for cowardly, handbrake football at home in a game like this. This should be approached positively, setting our stall out to win from minute 1. No "keeping in the game" or "keeping things tight". No passive timewasting bullshit where we take no interest in doing anything with the ball for 60 minutes. I want a positive lineup, and to see us going for it properly like a team that intends to win a game of football. If Cooper wants to keep his job, the opportunity is right there. These are his 4 winnable fixtures ahead of him now, we need 5 wins and a draw more before Christmas to have a shout at staying up. There's no time to piss about hoping to win later on. Get a win on the boards now, or get out of the club and stop wasting everybody's time.

Handbrake tactics to keep us in the game wasted 45 minutes, and put us 2-0 down - and that is the margin that we lost by. Cooper's default tactics are what has cost us - again. When we try to play on the front foot and actually play some attacking football we are a far better team than Tortoise-mode Leicester where we sit our shell with old duffers Ayew or BDCR wasting space that could be taken by good players. Today, Buononotte was one of our best players - but he has been binned offf to the bench for the last few games to accomodate the experience brigade, the same way Stephy was, and now Abdul is.

Why are Arsenal coming out to Finn Balor's WWE theme?

It's only 4 games It's only 5 games It's only the League Cup It's only 6 games

Gameplan to "stay in the game" going well, as usual. Can't wait to try to "keep it tight and stay in the game" for 70 minutes against Bournemouth next week until we're 2 goals down.

Next week's maths homework: Joromy is a young footballer and has moved to Chasea football club. Chasea have 9000 other boys in their academy who are the same age. All the boys are equally talented, as Chasea are a soulless corporate scum hole who relentlessly steal youths from all around the world. If 2 players from the academy make it to the first team per season, express as a fraction the chances of Joromy getting into the first team squad at Chasea. 45 academy players are sold to shitholes like Overton and Florest every season for PSR related money laundering reasons. Express as a percentage the probability that Joromy will be turned into a left back and told to "hit it down the channels to the big lad" by Shaun Derch. All the other Chasea youths are released and sent to the job centre and end up working at DcMonalds restaurant for minimum wage. If the minimum wage is £10 an hour, and a Gucci backpack costs £50000, work out how many hours Joromy will need to work to look as stylish as he could have done if he stayed where he was at a proper club with all his mates and top gave him a PS5 pro and a copy of Fc25 chucked in and ignored the horrible American hedge fund man and his tinpot plastic moneybags football club that only nerds would want to go to.

I put the first episode on last night, ended up watching 4 of them. Been very good so far.

Realistically, if we say we are targeting something like 38 points minimum for the season, then that's about 10 wins and 8 draws - meaning we need to be tracking roughly for 5 wins and 4 draws by the half way point at Christmas. Draws are looking about there, but we need to rustle up 5 wins between now and then. Makes the 4 games after Arsenal pretty critical - after that there are fixtures against the likes of Man U, Chelsea, Man City, Liverpool, Newcastle, Brighton, West Ham and Brentford. That's not a lot of winnable games on paper.

Are we still waiting for the nyoni tribunal? Seems the PL are very keen to crack down on clubs like us for overspending, but simultaneously have no appetite for making Liverpool pay the several million pounds they owe us for stealing our player.

We are pretty consistent about not having any attacks for the first 60-70 minutes at the moment, must be pleasing for him.

No joke, if he got a win or two in the bank by now I'd be happy to see where this was going. The fact he hasn't, and doesn't show any signs of delivering one any time soon, is what sends you down a stats rabbit hole trying to see if there's anything to look forward to - unfortunately for Coops, that particular cupboard is pretty damn empty.

The team looked bad in pre season The team looked bad in competitive PL games The team looked bad in the cup vs a League 2 team The underlying stats are bad, and indicate results will get worse than they already are if things revert to a mean level with finishing / goalkeeping. If things had gone according to XG, we'd have lost every game. The manager's past is riddled with bad stats than indicate he cannot correct his current long run without a win The manager's past indicates he is very poor at winning away games in the Premier League In game tactics are bad and not working, with noticeable problems with poor team shape and positioning, and players looking confused as to where they should be or what they should be doing There is very little change of tactics or formation on a game by game basis to try to correct this Team selections have been poor Subsitutions have been dreadful, to the point of not even making sense What, exactly, are we supposed to be looking to give us any hope that he is worth retaining, other than vague platitudes about "needing more time", or falsely labelling everyone wanting his gone as being solely motivated by his Forest links - what will he implement with more time? There is no evidence that a better style or cohesive team emerges from more time under his coaching, if his Forest team is any evidence.