filbertway

Either way, I'm pretty chill about the keeper situation. If he stays that's fine, if he goes and we get a fair price then that's also fine.

Yeah, in my mind chelsea was all but guaranteed, but you make some great points and I'm also less sure now Maybe 2 more years with us, then Ederson and Allison are both 34 ish. Assuming he develops, he could be a ready made replacement for either.

The fact that Man U and Spurs have gone this far in Europe surely puts paid to the silly notion that the prem is weaker than ever.

It's beautiful to see teams care more about scoring than stopping the other team from scoring. Should be the default setting for most managers

Man U could be a shout if they do away with Onana.

Haha i've not even bothered with the highlights, I was at a festival so the whole thing passed me by thankfully

Haha imagine! It'd be the absolute clearest indicator that he wants to be sacked and is calling the board out to be fair. If he does play Ward I expect the team to down tools and us to get annihilated.

Nah Wolves are on a 6 game winning streak. Southampton are about as crap as us

Unfortunately not I fancied us to bag against Brighton after hearing about their defence crisis. Aside from that, this is the one game I've been banking on us looking like a respectable side going forwards

So he's been playing injured since the Newcastle game? Jesus christ, we hate our players All the best Mads. Likable player and hopefully continues to improve and becomes a real top drawer keeper.

I'd expect a few goals. Both teams should be playing with relative freedom which means they should both be trying to score goals. I'm gonna go for a 3-3

I'd be all over the opposite, but they clearly seem them as likely to happen as I do

Logically it makes sense to develop when demand is down, assuming they actually have designs on being top half premier league club, which to be fair we've not seen evidence of for about 4 years.

If we don't replace him with another beast, I'll definitely be popping back into this thread to see if people now see what he brought to the team. This is his stats this season against other top level cms. This is the stats from the 19/20 season. I think you can chalk the passing and lower interceptions down to the fact that we're more of a low block team and less of a pressing and ball dominating than we were back then. He was also asked to keep it simple whereas now there seems to be more expectation for him to be Pirlo rather than Savage.

Rodgers went from using him at what he was best at and decided to make him play in a way that didn't suit him. 4 1 4 1 he was beautiful. When it moved it a 4 2 3 1 and he was asked to play with the ball more, it was no surprise to see a man that struggles to play football have performance levels decline. Having him next to Soumare is tough on him as well. May as well be in there by himself.

It'd be so incredibly dumb to sell this lad. We're not gonna get anywhere near his peak value and we need a quality centre back. It'd genuinely be worse than giving Vesty another 3 years, which is single handedly the worst decision I've seen a football club make.

How was that not a pen, he clearly takes Merino's left left before winning the ball?

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Didn't think that was a pen to be fair, way too soft. I agree with Clattenberg on that one, if your man's throwing his arms in the air he's faking it.

Clattenburg admitting he wouldn't give a deserved yellow because it's early. Horrible to hear officials admitting they don't apply the rules correctly and it just being accepted.

Yep that was how I understood it. I recall last time we were in the champ that our parachute payments were spoken for. Which made promotion incredibly important. Wasnt sure if we would have the decks cleared end of this year or once again be in a similar spot. Feels like we're painfully close to being another Sunderland or portsmouth

Yeah those loans are against future TV/prize money, so we know we'll be guaranteed x amount over a season, so we'll just pay that back to them when the Premier league gives us our share of prize money/tv money. On Footie Manager the TV money is paid monthly with the prize money obviously coming at the end. It just frees up the cash to spend immediately I guess and the bank make a lovely bit off the interest. I guess in principal it's similar to an overdraft.

I do fully appreciate the point you're making. But you'd have to be absolutely loopy to attribute that success to Rudkin given what he's done since. I think ultimately the issue is that he doesn't do what a director of football/sporting director does. He doesn't lead. He doesn't have a vision. He hires a manager and then we're really at the whims of how good that manager is as an actual old school manager. A good director of football would not see the massive fluctuations of performance that we've seen under Rudkin. There would be clear and steady improvement, small dips and peaks. There's clear evidence that the role he takes is essentially negotiator and and administrator. To allow the wage bill to swell to 100% of our turnover with no plan in place to generate a higher turnover or reduce that wage bill was gross negligence and should have seen him in the firing line immediately.

I think used correctly he's still a fine player and certainly good enough to be in most squads in the prem. We clearly see the guy completely differently though. I think if he goes to a new club. 1) he'll naturally be re-energised and 2) if he has a manager with a brain, they'll utilise his specific skillset. His physical presence and heigh in the middle will be a massive loss if we don't replace it.