ClaphamFox

“Muuuuuum, can I sell Leicester?” ”No you can’t! And clean your room before you come down - it looks like a bloody pig sty…”

Not his brand of it, judging from how utterly abysmal Everton were under him.

Not even in jest, mate. Not even in jest 😳

No

5-2-1-2

He doesn’t have any kind of relegation clause.

He’s not going anywhere - his injury has seen to that.

The only one of our better players likely to be sold will be Hermansen. Stolarczyk is ready to slot in. Yes, we need a new striker and a couple of CBs, etc, but overall we already have the basis of a very strong team, .

Literally no point in trying to appoint a new manager now, for the reasons you cite. Very few quality candidates available.

There were certainly plenty of posters predicting we’d either be going straight down to League One or end up ‘mid table at best’ in the Championship. Those of us predicting a swift return to the PL were accused of being deluded. There is a massive gap between the PL and the Championship. This makes it difficult for promoted teams to stay up but it also gives relegated teams an advantage when they go down. Our first 11 next year will be very strong by Championship standards. That doesn’t mean we’ll walk it, but we will be up there. These predictions that we’re in some inexorable death spiral towards the lower divisions are just catastrophizing arising (quite understandably) from depression about our current state.

Highly unlikely Bilal goes.

Two things can be true at the same time. It is definitely true that we have inflicted significant damage upon ourselves by veering away from a model that worked. It is also true that PSR is a crooked fiddle designed to reinforce the status quo and make it very difficult for clubs like ourselves to compete.

For the second consecutive season the three promoted sides are going to be relegated. This suggests that the PL’s crackdown on PSR is beginning to bite.

Our first eleven next season will be comfortably stronger than the large majority of the other teams in the division. We’ll be competing at the top of the table and be there or thereabouts at the end of the season.

The newly-promoted clubs might.

Yay!! The day of the match has arrived - the waiting is finally over, lads!

Interviews with footballers invariably are like this. It’s weird that people are getting so wound up about this one when it’s no different from the rest.

And he would get slaughtered if he said that.

Appointing Cooper in the first place was equally stupid.

We still play at the KP. We still wear blue shirts. Vardy still plays for us. The parallels are uncanny to the point of supernatural 😳

Disciplinarians are only effective if the players buy into it. Old-school military-type managers are a thing of the past. If Jock Wallace was appointed to manage our current squad, he’s lose the dressing room and be sacked within months.

Extremely limited choice of decent candidates at the moment - nobody in a job is going to quit at this stage of the season. Much better to wait until the summer when we'll have far more to choose from.

Damn right. Sunday's game already has all the hallmarks of this one in 2015:

The sharp pivot in our recruitment strategy after Cooper joined is one of the most damning pieces of evidence for the incompetence of those who run our club. We would not have signed Ayew or BCDR, and very likely would not have signed Skipp, had Enzo had stayed. We also would not have signed those players if Graham Potter - our first choice to replace Maresca - had joined instead of Cooper. Ditto Carlos Corberan, who we apparently admired but for some reason were not willing to fork out £4-5m in compensation to prise him away from West Brom despite dropping £25m on Skipp a few weeks later. The fact that the final two names on our shortlist were coaches as different from each other as Potter and Cooper (one providing clear continuity from Maresca, the other a clear departure) is insane. What was the plan? Did we even have one? If Potter wasn’t committed then we should have waited until July and gone after Corberan or cast the net again to find someone else. Instead we recruited a wholly unsuitable manager in a fit of pique/panic, allowed that manager to target players who we would never have considered under Maresca, then sacked that manager a few months later because - lo and behold! - he wasn’t connecting with the squad. It seems the primary reason Cooper got the job was because he was available for free, which is a mind boggling way to recruit a manager. The managerial appointment is far more important than that of any player - if you try to do it on the cheap, you are inviting disaster.

We’d all love to see more youth get into the first team. But let’s be realistic. Ben Nelson may well be in our first eleven next year. It’s great that Alves is getting minutes at Cardiff and I hope he steps up, but he still has a lot to prove. None of our other loaned players are likely to make the grade. Then we’re reaching down to the likes of Monga (if he’s still with us) and Evans, who are basically still schoolboys. I understand the attraction in the romantic idea of jettisoning the ‘shite’ and bringing kids in, but I suspect the novelty will wear off pretty quickly when we’re losing every week and hurtling towards the third division. Yes, we need to integrate youth and provide a clear pathway for talented youngsters, but solely relying on that strategy would sink us rapidly into obscurity.