Lillehamring

He was a decent kicker as i remember. - it was a decent squad with some really good players - Denny Walker probably the best home grown player. And a huge squad. I have some from 89 as well, and a bunch of Panther youth programmes (who i played for)

Carvalhio (sp?) took his so far forward, i guess it has less distance to travel, but surely it makes the angles tighter?

In theory, moving it that extra bit forward is as likely to cause a player to overhit it as get it perfect. They should have made the rule that the whole of the ball needs to be in the quadrant.

Nemesis by Agatha Christie The Long View by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Probably not the ones that used to be.

Corrrect. 1988.

The fact that he is world no 1 and reigning world champion and people are more interested in Luke Littler pretty much sums him up. You can see the comms people painfully trying to convince us that he is the one to watch, whilst clearly having no interest themselves. For a sport that so enthusiastically tries to raise it's profile and come across as something more than a bunch of fat blokes, humphries is the worst thing that could have happened - no one cares about their champion.

Or perhaps i'm not sitting around glued to foxes talk waiting for people to make ambiguous replies to my comments EDIT: Also, my answer wasn't dismissive - i said i appreciated your deeper understanding but prefer to trust the club. I think that's a calm and reasonable reaction.

So, you're saying (or trying to - the phrase is 'a stopped clock') that the only time the club do something well or sensible it is by sheer chance? Yeah, that's obviously what is happening

ie. winning in games where the opposition score, as opposed to winning games when their opponent fail to score. smart arse.

Always nice to hear - especially with so much negativity on the board. I think it's far too easy for people to just say 'oh, we score and just sit back and defend our lead'. And you point out some further extenuating factors that people need to factor into things. We don't know why Enzo seems to be making fewer, later substitutions but it certainly has seen us less dominant later in games. I think teams are also making earlier subs to try to combat the effort needed to keep track of our passing game, teams are also less willing to just carry on parking the bus once they concede - i seem to remember, i think it was stoke, and we scored early and their keeper was already happy to time waste. i think teams were initially happy to limit the damage, now they've seen we're not impregnable and when they go behind they decide to have a go. things have changed, we're not finding things as easy as at the start of the season, but i can't accept that in games like the sunderland one we'd be idiotic enough to believe the best thing to do is defend a 1-0 lead for 77 minutes.

I didn't say 'generally speaking' - i said they 'aren't necessarily' suited for the EFL. For example, Nacho should be scoring 20 goals at this level not 5. He just doesn't seem to be able to play against EFL teams the way he did against PL teams. I think it's fair to say that the PL and EFL are very different - we bought Daka and to play against PL teams and in europe, not to play against 22 teams that park the bus. There's a reason why we sold Hirst and why he's been brilliant for ipswich. So, to answer your last question - it's horses for courses - there's no right or wrong answer - but i'm sure many championship managers will go for players that have a track record at this level on a reasonable salary, rather than a PL player on higher wages that may or may not adapt. At the end of the day - the original comment i was replying to was that we should have no excuses for not winning because we have the most highly paid players - which is nonsense.

If you're talking specifically about the sunderland game - i posted some general analysis on how it seemed to be to me - that sunderland set out to park the bus, allow us to have the ball and to try to see it out, they had 30% possession. As such to the viewer it looks like we are going all in and inevitably dangerous. After we scored, for the immediate 10 minutes following sunderland had 60% possession - they totally changed their game plan, they started to press and to control the ball. I don't think it was lacklustre, i just think we found ourselves up against a team that like to attack (don't forget their xG is almost as high as ours across the season) that decided to fight for the game. Did we respond well? - well, we won, but it was very similar to the first meeting between us, when no one said we stopped trying, but said that sunderland were the best team we've faced.... The nature of the change being initiated by sunderland seems a lot more plausible (to me at least) than to believe that we just thought, after 13 minutes! 'that'll do it, let's just sit back and defend for 77 minutes'

Ok - well the question was: And my reply was that against boro we had 24 shots of which only 2 were on target - the inference thus being that it was our players who were responsible for not killing off the game.

Not sure there's much difference between 'being focussed on' and 'prioritising'? The implication is the same, surely Anyway, when i replied to your comment 'prioritising not conceding over scoring' is what i referenced - and it is still miles from the truth. Only Ipswich in all four leagues have scored more goals than us - if that's the result of 'prioritising not conceding over scoring' - the mind boggles at how many goals we might have scored if we'd prioritised scoring over not conceding!

Not mine!

Not saying they can't add better players, but they don't come across as a system team or at least not a system that has any proven durability at the top level. Their success seems to be based on hard work and out-scoring opponents - sustaining that tends to rely on finding the right attitude rather than the right quality, it feels adding quality to that approach rather than just players with the same attitude is only going to mean at some point you have to change the system - as we discovered, we were much like ipswich in 15/16, but we quickly discovered that having a limited system based on attitude and out-scoring opponents isn't sustainable and that you have to play a different way to survive in the prem long term. I think our policy is more sustainable because it's built around the system rather than the players. the reason pep and klopp have been so successful is when they lose a top player like sane or david silva, they don't have to rethink everything. Beyond that it's a variation on a model that has a proven track record, what precedent has been set for long term sustainability by a team that concedes well over a goal a game? A team with a good defence can do well in the PL, but a team that leaks goals is føkked - look at us last year, scored more goals than chelsea but only 3 teams conceded more and two of them were leeds and southampton. Their losses are moot really, because most of the games we've lost we did enough to win - Ipswich have drawn three times as many games as us and won 3 fewer - neither team have lost many so I dodn't think it relly says much about the virtue or no of wither system. Only time will tell, but i prefer our path to theirs.

I've never had much time for the opinion of dogs. Cats all day long for me.

Sure, but if, as the original poster suggested, we were more focussed on not conceding than on scoring, we wouldn't have the third highest xG - the reason it is so high is because we've created the best chances this season, and i'm sure we're right up there by volume of chances too. The simple fact is, by virtue of having a good system and good players we've been able to adopt a system that results in a high number of goal chances whilst limiting teams to a minimal amount of scoring chances. Certainly nothing to do with prioritising not scoring over scoring.

Sure, but like so many other posters here you're making an assumption that they don't have the belief to push on. which they've proved they do as i suggested in my post - we have extended our lead on numerous occasions. Again, just because we don't seem to have any urgency doesn't mean that the game plan isn't still to score further goals.

I can only go on what Maresca said at the start of the season - that he sees building a team as a 3 year project. Furthermore, the club under KP has always been focussed on the long game, never on a quick fix.

Well, it is for exactly the points i raised. And arguing that something 'should' be a certain way is just adding to the silliness. We 'should' have avoided relegation last year, but we didn't. Any reference to how 'great' this squad is, is just opinion and based on arbitrary things like salary and PL experience - but nothing is guaranteed. For all our payroll we don't, for example, have the same EFL experience as other teams, or the winning momentum that ipswich came up with. There are so many thing beyond simply salary - to single that out as an absolute defining factor of success is, sorry, silly.

But how true is any that? Boro simply rode their luck and, fair play, took their chances, we didn't - 24-2 in shots backs this up. Leeds looked completely bewildered against us. Bournemouth over ran us but we defended brilliantly and took our chance. QPR - see the boro game - 18-3 in shots this time Sunderland - see the bournemouth game. We've had more than enough chances to have won all 5 games - oddly, the two we seemed most likely to lose, the two games where it might be said our opponents got the better of us, were the games we won -

No system or team is perfect, there will always be dips, but you have to remember that before we played leeds (in fact up until the last 10 minutes of the leeds game) we'd actually been playing the best we'd played all season, wining 5 out of 5 scoring 15 and conceding just twice. The problem here is people trying to blame that dip in results on maresca and the tactics, when every man and his dog know it is because the players didn't execute.

I think it's more that this thread started off about tactics, segued into a subsidiary post-match thread, and now has been taken over by people who are just looking for someone to blame for a recent string of bad results.....