Cronky

I've never been a fan of his, but I've got to admit he did well last night. He really seems to have worked on his fitness, and he linked well with the midfield on occasion.

A shit manager with no game plan is my view. The team selection and game plan seemed extraordinarily stupid IMO. I'm happy to discuss it although I doubt Pards will be , the cockney twat. Well my feeling is that he wasn't bold enough, but to supporters like me, the professionals often seem too conservative. Pardew would say that he got a point in a difficult situation. Playing two centre forward types together does restrict a team, and so it proved. Maybe Pardew thinks the alternative would only work when Ben Arfa is fit and Marveaux is ready. He's perhaps going to use the Forest game to test that out. It's not possible to tell from the screen, but I can only assume that Pardew is very good at organising a defence, because none of the back four looked particularly secure as individuals. One goal conceded in four league games says something. The consoling thought is that if we can get a point while playing that badly, if we start playing well, we'll be flying.

I thought both full backs tonight looked poor in attack and in Taylor's case, poor in defence as well. At some stage, I hope we'll see Santon and Ferguson out there instead. 'Couldn't be worse' is a philosophy that often backfires, but we'd gain a lot going forward and surely wouldn't be much weaker in defence, if at all.

For most of the game, we had a very old-fashioned looking 4-4-2, and were overrun. Neither of the full backs were able to support the attack, and Cabaye and Tiote didn't get forward. We had the odd individual moment, and Best did well, but overall we looked very ragged going forward. What's happened to Tiote? That confidence and energy of last season seems to have gone. I lost count of the number of times he gave the ball away. Still, that's a difficult game out of the way, and we didn't lose.

That doesn't make sense to me. If we're playing it long, neither has the mobility to link easily with the other.

Yeah. Worrying isn't a good idea, but thinking comes in handy.

You're joking aren't you? Any away win in the Premiership is a good achievement, and we're not up against a rubbish side.

While I've made the same point myself a few times, I think it was a mistake for Llambias to say it publicly. Obviously if an owner thinks he's hated by the fans he's not going to feel like spending his own money on the club. But to say that openly is frankly stupid. It makes you look petty and it's not the image a professional businessman should want to display. It's probably the only answer I think was a bad one, the rest were fairly decent. Yeah, I'd agree. Generally the answers were a lot more forthright than I was expecting. However, the main hazard of this sort of exercise is you're almost bound to say something true but unwise, that can be turned against you.

Unless he says something funny on Twitter..... Unlikely.

the idea that these are the only two credible choices is astonishingly stupid tbf. though quite entertaining to watch the mental contortions you put yourself through in order to defend the indefensible. one of the other alternatives is to try and effect change whatever way you can. i'd say pardew is pleased to have such a big job considering his career record is mediocre, so he's not going to give it up just yet. but that's not to say he's not disappointed in the board, as any manager in football would be working for such unprofessional clowns. for the next few months and going into the january window he'll be walking a tightrope, trying to engineer pressure for funds, using his influence both in public and behind closed doors, while at the same time trying to stay in the good books of his employers. won't be easy. not surprising that you are oblivious to this subtle and complex course of diplomacy. I'm getting a bit tired of words being lifted out like this. I feel that if there is a battle, Pardew shouldn't be using these particular tactics. He's not actually saying that he doesn't trust the owner, but he seems to be trying to use the mistrust in which Ashley is held by the supporters, in order to strengthen his hand. It doesn't feel straight to me and it'll do no good.

Okay, I'll clarify my point. If you feel you're being fucked over by your boss, you have choices. You can grin and bear it or you can quit. What you shouldn't be doing is making these kind of strong public hints that you're not seeing eye to eye with your boss, with a whole load of vague statements. It's like he's trying to secure public support for some kind of private battle that he's facing. Pardew is being too clever by half here. He's liable to end up not being taken seriously by anybody.

Yet again, Pardew seems to be playing this game of running with the hare and riding with the hounds. If he feels that he's not being properly supported, he should quit. If he still trusts what he's being told, then he should stop trying to curry favour with the fans by this sort of 'hey, I know how you feel' type statement. He was quoted in the Times yesterday as saying that it was mistake for him to say that the club were '100 per cent' guaranteed to sign a striker - 'It's important that I put pressure (on the board) in any way I can. There was a little bit of that involved. I can say that publicly. But I still feel the enthusiasm we have generated at the start of the season has gone with the signing not coming in'. Well a) what are we to make of future statements by Pardew if he's admitted that he's been exaggerating the position in order to use pressure from the fans to force the board's hand? How can we trust what he's saying? and b) by creating this fuss over signing one striker rather than two (which is the reality of the situation), hasn't he played some part in any loss of enthusiasm? How exactly do the existing strikers (particularly Ba) feel about these very public votes of no-confidence? That's unless the 'loss of enthusiasm' bit is just more bullshit in order to put pressure on the board to deliver next time, which is a tactic he has admitted to employing. I think Pardew's judgement of football matters is very sound, but I wasn't completely surprised to read an earlier post that he fell out with some West Ham players, who considered him two-faced. Nolan gave a hint of that when it emerged that he was disappointed that Pardew didn't fight very hard to keep him, despite earlier statements about how valuable he was to the side.

That's true enough. However, that does mean that whereas Rooney can adapt to the needs of his team and the demands of a situation, Shearer basically performed one role and the attack needed to be built around it. I'd also say that Shearer, great player though he was, unlike Rooney never had much pace. But ultimately, Rooney is one of only two England players in my lifetime (Gazza being the other) who could transform a team's performance single handed. On form, he has energy, imagination, determination, skill, power - the lot - and keeps popping up all over the pitch setting problems for the opposition.

I'd say that Everton are a well-run club, both on and off the field. Considering their turnover, they've done very well. Trouble is, due to their recent and more distant history, their supporters expect success. That can only be delivered by a sugardaddy.

The biggest question mark against Bill Kenwright's competence lies in his willingness to hold a meeting with this kind of pressure group and not expect to get shafted.

Has the club itself actually said anything about when or if they intend to respond?

Shola, Lovenkrands and Best are among our four current best strikers. How can our B targets not be better options than them? Well any transfer is a gamble, and it's possible to spend a lot of money and not end up with a better option. But I find the way you've put the dilemma quite strange. Instead of looking at the players you don't rate that highly and saying we can find someone better, shouldn't we be aiming to get in the best player that we can possibly land? At the least, better than Ba, who I assume you feel is our best striker at the moment. To put it another way, if all we end up with is someone marginally better than our weaker players (as you define them), would it not be better to wait? Unless what we've seen of Ba is very misleading we are still missing a Bellamy type of player who will run down the channels and play off the big man. The two we have are Ben Arfa possibly, and Lovenkrands who is not fit for this level. Relying on Ben Arfa to be fit for most of this season is optimistic at this time when no one knows how completely he's recovered from a serious setback. So yes we should have brought someone in. Even Bellamy himself if no one else was available. I'm sure he would have preferred first team football here to sitting on Liverpool's bench. I was starting to get quite confused about what sort of striker we were looking for. Perhaps Pardew figured we generally lacked a bit of pace in our strikers, but you have to look for other qualities as well if you're forking out £10m+. On the general situation, I don't know what I can add to what I've said before. A lot of the responses seemed to be based on emotion more than anything. The squad we've got is actually quite decent and we may as well wait and try and land players who can really lift us. New opportunities will come up and the money won't disappear. Well taking the last point, the big fear seems to be that the caution about spending is just Ashley trying to salvage money for himself, and the cut-off time for him to prove otherwise was Sept 1st. Fair enough, but I still believe that he has a longer-term plan in mind, and part of that plan is not getting caught on expensive panic buys that either don't improve the team much, and / or get us hamstrung financially in the longer-term, which is what has happened in the past. Has there not been a boom and bust element to the way in which our transfer spending has gone in the last few years? I don't actually think that team building by one-off splurges actually works.

Shola, Lovenkrands and Best are among our four current best strikers. How can our B targets not be better options than them? Well any transfer is a gamble, and it's possible to spend a lot of money and not end up with a better option. But I find the way you've put the dilemma quite strange. Instead of looking at the players you don't rate that highly and saying we can find someone better, shouldn't we be aiming to get in the best player that we can possibly land? At the least, better than Ba, who I assume you feel is our best striker at the moment. To put it another way, if all we end up with is someone marginally better than our weaker players (as you define them), would it not be better to wait?

Nice. Regular football at that level might, just might, get him on track. It's so frustrating. For all his faults, more than once, he came on as a sub and completely transformed the team's attitude and performance. Any manager that can tap into that potential will have a really good player.

tbf he played well against City where he got his 2 league goals, just doesn't fit into what Dalglish is trying to do at Liverpool and reeks of panic signing There's a bit of a flavour-of-the-month feel to a few of Liverpool's signings. Carroll, Henderson, and Adam were getting a lot of media attention last season. This defender Coates apparently had a very good Copa America and you have to wonder whether he's been signed on the strength of that. Jose was a bargain at £5m, but tbh I don't think he's quite as good as his media profile suggested last season. They hit on a gem in Suarez, and he's improved them no end though.

The thrust of the Luke Edwards’ article was that there were times when you do have to pay over the odds for the player you want. Fair enough, but was this really the time? So far as we can tell, we’d had bids accepted for the players on our A-list, but those players opted for other clubs that had better prospects. We were looking at our B-list, and as such it’s a bit more questionable whether you should over-pay, or hang on to a future transfer window when a better player might become available. A lot of people seemed to be getting worked about us not signing Maiga or Roux, without knowing a great deal about the players. That’s what can happen at the end of the window, when a lot of pressure gets put on a club’s owners to ease the anxiety of the fans and the manager. Landing the wrong player for £10m, plus a 5-year contract at £40k per week is a £20m+ mistake. I can’t say that our position is so desperate that we need to take a risk. Time will tell whether it’s all a big con and Ashley’s going to hang on to the money, or whether in time it’s going to be re-invested on the playing side as promised. However, I do believe that this owner is working to a different time-scale from most fans and journos, and now is not the time to judge.

Fair point, you're right to a degree. But even things that they're doing right, like restricting the amount they'll pay transfer fees, they can't actually come out and say because it will influence future deals. And things like the fact that Ashley would sell up to any decent buyer, they can't say because it will only cause more instability. Right or wrong, there are a lot of things that it would be very unwise to comment publicly about. Well, if the club make a point of saying that ALL the Carroll money will go back into the club and then 8 months later have a net transfer spend of about £500k i think there are some questions that are fair to ask. There's something strange about your defending of them on really quite minor points. I don't defend that promise about the Carroll money, I've always said they were wrong to promise it would all go on the team. IIRC the comment about it all being spent on 'the team' came from Pardew, not Llambias. His wording also led to the interpretation that it would all go on transfer fees, and nothing else. Now you may say that Pardew was only repeating, word for word, what he had been told - 'the owner's mouthpiece' line. However, I think we've seen more recently that Pardew tends to speak from some middle ground of his own devising, in between the owner on the one hand, and the fans and players on the other. Some of it may be literally what he's been told, some may be his interpretation of what's been said, and some may be his own slant in order to put pressure on the owner. Someone can dismiss it all in the word 'lies' if they want, but these sort of games are what goes on in the real world of a tough working environment. Personally, I think Pardew runs the danger of trying to appear to be all things to all men. It's too easy then to end up confusing the picture, or making yourself look dishonest.

That's a good point. I think the difficulty with both Shola and Carroll isn't so much a lack of intelligence as a lack of pace, by which I mean that initial burst of acceleration that can get you ahead of your marker on to the ball played through. I think it's down to their physiques, and it's a weakness that won't completely go away. These leggy players can move fast in full flight, but they take a while to get going.

We had a terrible last 20 minutes. It was like we were scared of losing the lead and were afraid of committing players to the attack. We surrendered the initiative to an inferior side and nearly paid the price. It's all very well if we can defend like Italians and hit teams on the break, but the back four looked shaky and our counter attacks were slow and indecisive. It was like we were just trying to retain possession, but we seemed to lack the mobility to really do that. Barry had a great game, despite all the criticism. Smalling doesn't look like an international-quality full back. Lampard doesn't offer enough any more.

He's doing okay, but he still looks to me like a centre back who's filling in. We need the full backs to support the attack, and Cole's the only one who looks confident doing that.