TRon

Thought he was ok tbh. Bruno was the best midfielder by a long way today, but Willock did a job. Maybe I'd have been harsher if we hadn't won.

Chaos merchant is a pretty good description tbf.

They've been so shit over the last couple of months I'd almost forgot they could still go up via the play offs.

Think it's at that stage where the games are all hard so no point looking past the next one.

Thank God we won because it felt like this ref should have had the cards out long before he did. If anything the booking for the dive was probably the least cynical of the Ipswich challenges.

He should be, pretty sure that was going in otherwise. He hit that pretty sweetly.

Didn't feel like that until we got the pen tbh. They might not have offered much threat, but we were having real difficulty finding any space in their box with the bus parked.

Yeah from that point of view it is definitely more important, but like Villa, it's one of those that if we can't win, it's just as important that we don't lose.

I don't see the Brighton or Chelsea games as any different, we could win either or lose either. Chelsea might be at home, but they still have a lot of good players who could hurt us. Brighton probably less so, but I could just as easily see us winning down there as well.

Yeah, for what it's worth I think we would have lost against Villa anyway, it's more the rest of the season I'm concerned about.

Not sure he would have necessarily, we've had games like that previously when it's gone badly wrong, and not been able to change much. To tighten up defensively, we'd have needed to do it from the off, maybe a similar gameplan to the one we deployed at Arsenal in the cup semi final, but I am not sure Howe would have done that following five wins on the run. But it will impact our performances if Howe is not back soon, Tindall's interviews don't inspire confidence for more than a couple of games.

Given that we were playing 3 games in 7 days, you could argue we should have played a more conservative game and that way we wouldn't have needed to match Villa's energy, which with their resources, was definitely a level above ours. But hard to argue changing a gameplan when we'd won 5 on the bounce. But in hindsight we didn't really have the legs to go toe to toe with them.

Felt like that was happening in midfield as well, we were attempting to press all over the pitch, but they held the ball well and sent runners away into space.

I haven't even contemplated any other result. We'd expect to win this normally, but this is the last easy fixture left. We don't want to be needing to win the hard ones.

Agree. People are saying they wouldn't swap it, neither would I. But if we want to keep our best players and be seen as a top club worldwide, we need regular CL football.

Yeah there wasn't much luck involved. We schooled them both.

Barnes, Murphy and Tonali were getting most of the plaudits yesterday, but Joelinton was outstanding, and arguably MOTM. Not just winning the ball, but skating through challenges to set moves up on quite a few occasions. He doesn't get enough credit for his great close control under pressure, and when he comes through those challenges, he quite often pings in a killer pass to top it off.

He does seem to be involved in a lot of goals conceded this season, or maybe it's just the games I've seen. But that's my take away from it as well. He's usually trying to do last ditch tackles when they fly in, and that does suggest he's a natural defender.

The other side of that is, if we have in inverted winger like most teams do, then Tino would come into play a lot more next season as an overlapping full back. Murphy would be the out and out right wing option.

Winning silverware is the final piece. Anyone involved in the final, including players who have been rubbished previously now think of themselves as winners. Keegan always said that first trophy would have made all the difference to his teams. You can see the belief in all the players now, they trust each other as well, which is massive.

Bruno only about a week late with that challenge.

Aye you can say what you like about his game, but what he does, he does very well indeed. He's been putting in pearler crosses all season without any argument.

There's no way you can tell whether he touches it or not. In the end they gave the pen for a reckless challenge to get away from having to justify it so that explanation is shite anyway.

How does Gordon get back in ahead of this lad? Genuine question.

Don't want too many subs early, it will kill the momentum. We can score 7 here.