HawK

2023/2024 - Lewis Miley - 17 years old - 1701 minutes played 13 less appearances than Yamarl and 415 less minutes played. 11 players have played more minutes than Miley this season.

2023/2024 - Lamine Yarmal - 16 years old - 2136 minutes played Edit - Only Gundogan has made more appearances this season in their whole squad.

He's fantastic at carrying the ball, we need him at left back overlapping Gordon with Trips back on the right when he's fit again. He gives so, so much to the team.

Bit of a learning moment from me that, I always jump to the lazy/disinterested/moody/unhappy/doesn't like the manager reasons for players who seem to be underperforming for periods. Playing through injuries must be a lot more common that I would have thought from playing FM at least. On FM you always send them to a specialist rather than do injections, and just play the 16 year olds to keep everyone happy. But it's not your livelihood on the line and you can't save-scum IRL.

Did my ACL and kept going for 45 mins after. What was initially just a feeling of soreness just got more and more sore.

But going hand in hand with the high intensity press is an ability to keep the ball when it's won, we don't do that, we just don't have the quality. So the amount of out-of-possession running is multiplied by our lack of technical ability on the ball. Liverpool and Dortmund have and had much greater quality across their squad to retain the ball.

Came here to say pretty much exactly the same thing. Training with 100% intensity is fine if you're just playing 38 PL games and a domestic cup game here and there, and able to take a rest when other teams are playing in Europe. But with our CL commitments this season, I think many of us were quite rightly asking the question before the season started as to how Howe was going to approach this season as anyone could see training with and playing with 100% intensity every single time, with our full court press style, wasn't going to last. I'm not surprised at all with how bad it's been. Correlation does not mean causation, there's other factors as well of course, but playing nearly the same unchanged XI every game and not protecting players when given the opportunity is something I'm disappointed with Howe about. Using your full squad of players is basics at the high levels we're aiming for. There's definitely some aspects to squad management that Howe needs to go away and take stock of for next season. There's a reason that the best teams in the country just don't simply out-run their opponents like we often did last season, because they can't do it every game with the schedules they have to keep. If we're going to mix it up with the big boys, we need a quality-focused approach rather than simply running teams off the park.

Agreed, it's not just one thing. He hasn't progressed as much as we thought he would. If anything he seems to have gone backwards.

He needs a break, he's played nearly all the minutes of every game since he came back from injury.

I think you could get 3 Pintos in one team couldn't you? With Joao and Nuno as well

I'm glad we have all these restrictions in place to stop all these irresponsible owners doing a Portsmouth with their clubs.

Their jurisdiction only covers players in the English leagues and presumably only offences committed on those leagues? How much betting can a man do in a summer on football here?

Noticeably always seemed to look for a first-time pass though, very good read of the game. Always keeping track of what his options were before he gets the ball, polar opposite of wor Sean tbh.

Don't think we ever have, was just a random thought

I think Joelinton on the right side of attack could be interesting. Can carry the ball, receive it, hold it up and his work rate off the ball in and out of possession would be good too. Apart from cutting in and shooting from his left, not exactly sure what Almiron brings ahead of him on paper at least.

For a lad who was rumoured to have had Liverpool interested at one point before we signed him, he's not exactly had the development arc you'd expect. Can't get them all right.

Can see both sides of this, both sides have valid points. Hoping we can reach a happy middle ground.

Miley behind Bruno and Willock could be interesting, Miley is incredibly good at retaining possession under pressure, let alone for a 17 year old, he can always receive the pass from defence and can play it forward. Not sure about him off the ball though.

Love arrogant players though, need a bit of that alongside the huff & puffers

Hope he doesn't have an Ameobi-esque fitness arc and turns into a mini-hulk.

Setting the record for the most posts per minutes played of any first team player in living memory

Looking up is something many of our players struggle with, no exaggeration.

That's the point