Lillehamring

oops

Well, this is... different.

I swear, any team in the league would be beating us tonight. It's embarrassing.

The only comfort is that, playing like this, detroit will win the superbowl.

Completely unrecognisable 49ers. Detroit are on fire, but that wasn't the real niners - just inexplicable.

Well, the raven's showed that even when KC look on top they can be stopped, and they gave up some big plays tonight defensively, only for the ravens to self-destruct.

That long pass on 2 minutes is pretty much kansas' only offence of the 2nd half - can't see the NFC being that concerned by this performance.

2nd half both defenses have utterly dominated - this is still anybody's game.

i was ****ing 11. They played in the first game i watched (super bowl XIX - which i had no knowledge of).

nope - niners fan since the 80s

I meant it figuratively - that we aren't 'buying' him when he's out of contract, we're buying him now, under contract, but paying for him in summer. It's all moot, as we haven't even signed him, let alone that we know how the deal has been arranged - i wouldn't be surprised if it's another one that is listed as 'an undisclosed fee'-

Well spotted, sir.

Especially as 2 or 2.5, in the grand scheme of things, is peanuts...

Or you can read it as a deferred payment, which will no doubt be FFP related.

I believe this is just league games - so he still hasn't achieved that landmark.

Um, i'm not waxing lyrical about the academy just questioning the validity of this suggestion: There is surely a point being made about the academy's ability to 'develop talent' and a lack of emphasis on loans when we put out a team that is 50% made up of academy/ex-acedmy players. I have no idea what albrighton and praet have to do with this - no one is talking about this status being a regular occurrence, but given that raikhy and cover were both given first starts, it is clear that maresca prefers to have players close to him rather than on loan and is not afraid of throwing them in at the deep end. The '2 keepers' argument is a bit thin - there will always be five plus first team fringe players (albrighton, praet, yunus etc) that will be the go to players as subs - a 2nd keeper or an academy player would simply be making up the numbers. And i'm not sure enzo wasn't arsed, but simply hopeful that the back up players were good enough to get a result, which proved to be generally correct. What ever shortcomings the academy has, it's function as a pipeline to the first team is not one of them.

In a half where everyone was poor, i didn't feel like he stood out as being any worse than anyone else - it certainly didn't help that Marcal genuinely had a poor game in front of him, and coady looked decidedly rusty to the side of him. Also, i think 'taking some time' is a ridiculous thing to say - he was out for 3 months and since coming back (before yesterday) has had 10 minutes against huddersfield and 90 against Millwall - in footballing terms, this is nothing. I'd say he's probably a long way short of where he was at before his injury.

Surely just the one assist from albrighton?

As i posted in the u21s thread - you have to consider who he is linking up with - i'm sure he'd do a much better job if he was linking up with winks, vestergaard, faes and ricardo....

you're actually saying that on a day when we had 8 academy players in the 1st team squad?

Well, i think the answer to that is how much better we were when ricardo played. Cover was decent but wasn't involved nearly enough, which he needed to be in that pivot role...

To be fair he'd probably do better if he had vestergaard, winks, faes and ricardo to pass to.

Who cares if there's a sell on - if he's great we have a great player sell him for loads and it's all profit even if we lose a bit to inter. If he's shit, we sell him for nothing back to italy. It may be considered 'weak negotiating' but we're in the championship and are lining up a player of this quality, someone must have said the right thing to him - does it really matter if the deal isn't perfect?

Hmm, i really didn't see it. The difference between the two halves makes the comparison pretty meaningless . after the first goal, birmingham hardly did anything on either side of the pitch. Anyway, JJ wasn't bad but no comparison to the impact Ricardo made, that's my point.

Well, we see what we want to see. Doyle had far more defending to do, so it's not really a fair comparison. But JJ, for me, still looks a bit lost on the ball, like he really doesn't know what to do with it. He wasn't bad, neither was doyle, but i wouldn't say JJ had anywhere near the same impact as ricardo.