TRon

Agreed. First serious question should be "why don't you watch your players taking penalties you fraud"?

There's no reason why we can't be the ones who turn into Pep's Barcelona instead though. They are a tough side, but we have the better players. Let's show it and bring back all three points.

Is Ross Wilson still expected to take up the DOF posiiton? I could swear I heard somewhere that another club might be in the picture.

Chelsea have been fucking shite like. Hard to tell which team is down to 10 men.

It's through gritted teeth I say it, but it's a good result for us. Man U will do nowt this season, and this reins Chelsea back into the midtable scrum.

I don't know why people don't acknowledge this. If PIF were allowed to put their money into buying a £150m replacement and pay him 300k/week, then might well be we could just have held him to his contract and sat him on the bench for a year. Shit, we could have paid Isak that £350k/week and he'd have probably signed another 6 year contract.

You picked a pretty strange time to become unhappy then.

I've already said this is what I think happened. Howe makes the final decisions on players coming or going, we don't make any signings that don't meet his approval. His attitude changed towards Isak once he realised Isak wasn't fully invested and had no intention of buying in again. Even if we'd made him stay, we'd have had the same carry on in January. Howe wants players who give 100%, I'm convinced he'd have wanted Isak gone if it allowed him to buy a suitable replacement.

I doubt any ownership would make you happy tbh.

That's pretty much all of them now.

Yeah the Newcastle ship has sailed, I think we would have went for Wolt anyway if we had thought there was any chance of getting him at the time.

Thank fuck for that as well.

I wonder if there is a release clause in there. Signing a deal until 2033 seems madness if he has any ambition of playing for a bigger club.

It's lose-lose for me either way. If Ekitike keeps Isak out it will be delicious, but feels like they stole Ekitike from us as well. Need them both to fail really.

Very important pointer as to where we need to improve. Players who can't deal with getting pressed need to be upgraded. Easier said than done, but it's the next part of our evolution.

He should have been bombed out before the game kicked off tbh.

Definitely worked out that way, and even though I was dead against it at the time, I had no idea that Isak wanted Liverpool so badly. Someone at the club should have had a clue though.

Agree. We had a good go at Barca, and I think we weren't far off getting a good result if we'd had someone up front who could capitalise on those early chances. But at the same time, the longer the game went on, you could see the gap widening as their players started passing around our press. It's nowt to be ashamed of, their first team is probably worth twice as much as ours. What I took from it was this is the direction we need to go. Quality counts in the end.

FWIW I thought our defending was class...which it has been all season. Trips never really gave Rashford much while he was out wide, and we always seemed to have someone in there to cut out the last man before Schar's injury. Our game plan was solid, we just lacked a striker who could have put one away when we got those chances in the first half.

Same. We obviously caught them in early doors and could have had a couple of goals, but the longer the game went on, the more control they got. Over 60% possession away from home takes some doing, and it's not like we were sitting back and just letting them have the ball in their own half. I found it pretty impressive how they managed to pass the ball between tight spaces to evade the press. Especially givent it wasn't a hugely experienced Barca team from what they were saying on the tv commentary.

I didn't think we were great tbh. We pressed brilliantly to start with, but we were also quite careless with the ball when we had it. It was a mixed bag from us, but we gave it everything effort wise.

You weren't sitting in front of Jason Tindall by any chance?

Absolute masterclass in how to operate in tight spaces and evade the press. Shame it was against us, but it's a good reminder that skill is still more important than brute force in football.

Solano wasn't just about the crosses, he could ping a pass from deep right to a player's feet, that's why we used him as a full back as well sometimes. Just a much better quality player than Murphy, although tbf Murphy is quicker and has other attributes.