Rich

You're blaming Parker, alone, for Butt having no passing options. That's when you know you're past the point of no return with an opinion on a player, mate, it's nothing but bandwagon. I don't like Butt much, but I appreciate when he does something well and I certainly don't blame him when other players' shortcomings are mentioned. Think it's pointless continuing this as you obviously have your opinion set in stone on El Capitan and I'm not going to agree with it just yet, so I'll bow out.

Do you think Butt was better than him? I've made a point of watching both closely since the anti-Parker bandwagon started up and I thought the Manc was absolutely anonymous for the vast majority of this game. His passing is consistently terrible, he's slower than a tortoise running in treacle, he's impetulant and he cannot tackle for toffee. Neither of them are great, but from what I see I think Butt is miles more inferior. You're spot-on about Roeder's decision-making, though. Emre's just returning from a massive injury and it's our biggest game of the season, it would have been a massive risk for both him AND us to start him tonight. He simply cannot be match fit after playing 20-odd minutes of football in over 2 months. I know the team that was selected was utter dross and that Emre might have made a difference if on from the start, but we can never say for sure that it would have seen us through. We could have lost by a landslide, or he could have been badly injured. I'm just glad he got another piece of a game under his belt and that he looked miles better than both of our other central players when he came on.

Didn't you just say in another thread that no manager could work with these players?

I am fighting the urge to abuse you.. Then again,can't say you didnt deserve to win.. f*** fighting the urge, just tell the Dutch cutn to f*** off to his own board. Bellend. Howay man, he wasn't particularly offensive with that post. He wasn't,just bad timing..very bad timing.. It has to be accepted. It's part and parcel of football, fans baiting each other. Let them have their moment.

I agree. We weren't set up for counter-attacking football at all. I'd have kept Duff on. The reason he was quiet in the second half was we weren't giving him the ball. I'd have put on Emre and Milner for Sibierski and Parker. I don't think Parker played that well at all. It was the usual story. Good at closing down the opposition, poor in possession. Once we went 2-0 down that wasn't what we needed. This. Exactly fucking this. WHEN are people going to wake up and realise that Parker is not the fucking answer? Emre offered us sooo much more tonight. Aye his set pieces were gash, but at least he offered a threat going forward. He was better than the vast majority, mate. I didn't see anyone else putting the ball in the net towards the end of the game. He ran his bollocks off, as well, which is more than a fair few did tonight. Emre was very good when he came on, I thought. Shame he wasn't fit enough to start. How do you know Emre wasn't fit enough to start? I reckon he was. Parker runs around in Circles and offers very little in terms of retaining possesion. I would never sign him again given the chance. He didn't look at all fit to me when he came on, if he did start then he'd have had to come off at half-time or on the hour I'd imagine. In any case, Roeder was never going to make the decision between Butt and Parker, was he?

Similar here. I can feel the anger inside of me and I feel like snapping, but I'm becoming conditioned enough to tuck it away and keep a level head. It's more hard work than it's worth getting upset at yet another exit from a cup competition.

I am fighting the urge to abuse you.. Then again,can't say you didnt deserve to win.. Fuck fighting the urge, just tell the Dutch cutn to fuck off to his own board. Bellend. Howay man, he wasn't particularly offensive with that post.

Caught between a rock and a hard place going into this game seems to be the way we looked at things as a club, we didn't deserve to go through on tonight's performance.

I agree. We weren't set up for counter-attacking football at all. I'd have kept Duff on. The reason he was quiet in the second half was we weren't giving him the ball. I'd have put on Emre and Milner for Sibierski and Parker. I don't think Parker played that well at all. It was the usual story. Good at closing down the opposition, poor in possession. Once we went 2-0 down that wasn't what we needed. This. Exactly fucking this. WHEN are people going to wake up and realise that Parker is not the fucking answer? Emre offered us sooo much more tonight. Aye his set pieces were gash, but at least he offered a threat going forward. He was better than the vast majority, mate. I didn't see anyone else putting the ball in the net towards the end of the game. He ran his bollocks off, as well, which is more than a fair few did tonight. Emre was very good when he came on, I thought. Shame he wasn't fit enough to start.

he was bloody awful, you could equally say "huntington couldn't keep a cool head alongside such and such" or "solano couldn't keep a cool head" etc etc. load of crap to say he's some put upon hero a la Maldini who is wrongly suffering due to his team mates, he made by my count about 15 or 16 INDIVIDUAL errors tonight, which is pretty incredible. awful even by his poor standards. Yes, yet there's a thread exclusively for him! The whole defence was shit. What would you expect from this CB you evidently wish was out there in his place? A god-like saviour amongst schoolkids? It says much for your tenuous stance that you would count his errors alone, after he'd been one of our best players recently. I take it you counted the errors of Oba Martins? Butt, maybe? Shay Given? Pathetic. Trying to scapegoat a god-awful team performance on any one player is worthy of Andy Townsend, brother. Tend to agree, I thought Butt was worse than anyone for the first 60 minutes and yet he seems to be escaping from most people's criticism. People DO have favourites and they DO have players that they simply dislike and want to see the back of, it's just nature. Not sure you can blame people for picking scapegoats after that performance Ank, he was fairly abysmal - but as you say there were plenty on an even keel with him. I think the main point of people's frustrations is that he's still here after multiple performances of a similar nature over a number of years.

At least they have that nutball in goal again, let's hope he continues from where he left-off last time around: by that I mean with his constant fannying around, not that save he made from Martins.

I completely agree with the Nut here. I thought they were fairly fucking terrible at SJP and incredibly boring to watch, aye we know you can pass the ball between the defenders and the goalkeeper, well done. Their lack of a right-back was something else I picked up on, one of their centre-halves was always yelling for somebody to track back and cover Duff. They do seem to have pace either side of Arveladze and Dembelele starting will probably make a difference to them, but I'm still confident we'll go through. 2-2 draw or something along those lines, but I favour us to win over them. Hope this doesn't come back to bite me on the tukkus.

Only until Saturday, pet.

'Cos that pink BLATANTLY clashes with that blue collar.

Would people be accepting of a pink trim, to match the sponsor?

If something collapses on me, I'm going to haunt you for the rest of your days. Not in the good way, either.

DOOM MONGERER!

Well done. This was very predictable, HTL. He mooned at his own fans at the weekend, didn't he!? Lovely lad.

I just kept refreshing the bastard, it took fucking ages. Tell him to stick at it.

BBC Story Anyone else going to this? £10 for adults, £5 for kids. I never got to the old Wembley and so when I heard the tickets for this match were going on-sale today I thought I'd ring a couple of the lads and see if anyone was up for it. 2 hours of sitting on the sometimes-broken/sometimes-refreshing FA Website finally paid off as I managed to get tickets in the South East Corner of the new ground, after much arse-twitching. Then it was off to GNER.com to sort out train tickets, which proved to be a royal scare as well because I'd spotted return tickets (Fri-Sun) for £50 each and by the time I'd phoned around to see if the times were okay they'd fucking vanished from the website! The next available prices were over £100 each. Astounding. Cue more arse-twitching, until I thought I'd phone GNER with a dodgy story to "complain" that I'd had the cheaper tickets in my basket and the page had "refreshed automatically", causing them to vanish. The lass on the other end of the phone was great and gave me the seats for the same price as I had originally saw them at. Result. Next stop was to find some decent accomodation and £60 each for two nights has got us into some snazzy-looking apartments in between Wembley and Central London, with a tube station right nearby. £125 each for two nights in the Smoke, complete with train travel and match tickets. I'm amazed it's been so cheap. Does anyone on here bother watching England much? I've never seen any type of England team play anywhere before. Not really that arsed about them. Should be good if only for the fact that Taylor and Milner should be playing and Nigel Pearson will be managing them, as Stuart Pearce cannot take charge of this particular game.

Exactly what I was going to type. Wish people would learn the words an' all! It is like a fucking sprint-song though when it gets going.

I posted the link up on here sometime last week, I think. Didn't seem like anybody was too bothered at the time. Is that NSG making a tit of himself again as "Obafemi Martins"? Nah it isn't, for some reason it wont let me register I'm surprised, because whoever did it got some good bites straight away. It smacked of experience. I particularly liked the one calling Martins a "chocolateletter" and saying he would "melt in the DSB". Clever stuff.

I posted the link up on here sometime last week, I think. Didn't seem like anybody was too bothered at the time. Is that NSG making a tit of himself again as "Obafemi Martins"?

The problem with Neill is he's on something like 60k at West Ham, would you pay him that? Dyer's getting £80k+, Owen's on £100k+, Duff must be on £60k-ish, same with Martins... Luque is getting paid £40k or there abouts. Obviously these won't be exact figures, so feel free to pull me up on any you think might be way out. £60k these days is sadly becoming fairly normal - I actually dread to think what we're paying the likes of Carr and Babayaro at the minute and the fact that we are paying Luque £40k a week (or so) for practically nothing means that I would not object to us getting shot of him and buying a first-choice fullback and paying him £60k p/w. I don't doubt that it's obscene, but I'm sure the likes of Wayne Bridge would command a similar sort of wage, and I personally think that Neill is a far better bet than the likes of Johnson and Hoyte, who are yet to really prove anything in the game. It all depends on Solano, really. If he can play to his current level for another season then I would not object to us looking at someone like Hoyte and preparing him for the future. If Solano isn't going to be the solution next season, then we need to look at getting somebody of proven class in. Is Neill definitely on £60k p/w? Was he getting that at Blackburn? (Seems outlandish for them lot!) The only mention I've heard of the £60k thing came from someone who was describing him on the new database of Football Manager, that's why I'm asking. All the papers put him as £60kpw, in fact every media source listed it at that figure, the FM update came a month after the window shut (and am sure it wasn't even that figure) , so hardly its fault now is it? Sigh. I never said it was "FM's fault". Merely said that I had only heard the figure of £60k p/w from someone who got it from the game. I didn't read any of the multiple news stories about Neill's move to West Ham at the time, I don't think. And if I did, I simply didn't remember his suggested wage. Even so, who can say that all of the media sources have got it right? All it takes is one bit of wrong information from a reputable source and the rest will follow, i.e. the "Shearer is always our highest earner" thing.

All fair enough, but we don't know that Neill would want £60k p/w if he gets relegated with West Ham. He's hardly in as strong a bargaining position as he was when he moved there. I do agree with you in that it's daft money, as well, but even at SJP it's hardly an uncommon wage, which was my gist. My personal view on things is that I'd keep Solano, try and see if Edgar has the potential to be a quality right-back and sell Stephen Carr, making do with the two former for next season while we concentrate on more pressing areas of the squad. I'd rather we got a really high-class left-back instead of two average players for both full-back positions. I could even survive with Solano/Carr as our options if we bought quality in other areas. Might be a risk, but if Solano doesn't work out then we've still got umpteen players who can fill in there to a degree and January would provide a chance to strenghten that area in a new market.