stozo

Think they could have had a really good season if it wasn't for all their injuries. Players who featured in the Liverpool and Man U defeats who wouldn't get in the team now - Frimpong, Jenkinson, Miquel, Lansbury, Bendtner, Arshavin, Coquelin and Troare. That's a pretty long list!

It's a little bit tragic watching Balotelli. Obviously has the talent to be a world class player but seems destined to throw it all away because of his attitude. Best thing he can do is get out of City if Mancini stays. I think their relationship is beyond repair.

Why is Douglas free? Why only 2-3m for Pieters? Why are we selling Best?

Can't believe the size of our injury list currently. Any news today on Cabaye, Colo and Tiote for Monday?

Yep would love to see us back in Europe and would hope to see us taking the competition seriously.

Frustrating to watch but we are defending really well. Just need to keep the ball a bit better when we do get it.

As expected we got hammered. 5-0.

Just realised that the combined age of our two starting CB's today is 34. Simon Davies who's starting for Fulhan is 32.

Indeed, I fear we could be on the recieving end of another one-sided scoreline. Good experience for the younger players though who are going to be playing against some players who are basically first-teamers.

Just seen that Inter are currently leading Genoa 5-4.

Can see this being really high scoring regardless of who wins. If both teams don't score I'll be stunned!

subs Elliot, Ferguson, Santon, Gosling, R.Taylor, Vuckic, Ameobi.

(4-3-3): Krul; Simpson, Williamson, Perch, Gutierrez ©; Guthrie, Tiote, Cabaye; Ben Arfa, Cisse, Ba

Article in Journal today saying he doesn't want to move his family, wants to become a coach and would like to be a player/coach next season.

No Bellamy! We got this. No Agger more importantly.

I really don't think any of us are in a position to say what Donachie is like as a coach. I certainly have no idea (and I suspect you don't either) whether he is a bad, average, good or excellent coach. My point is simply that the fact our reserve team is getting beaten regularly is probably more down to us blooding kids who aren't at reserve level yet than whether Willie Donachie is a good manager or not.

1. I don't really understand how you can say they are the same mix of players when they are a totally different set of players. 2. Looking at all the Beardsley results the highest number of players he played who also played yesterday was three. 3. Donachie's record after 6 games was Won 3, Drawn 1, Lost 2. Not exactly an immediate descent into horrible form. Yes, it is quite annoying to see the reserve team getting beat by large margins but the end goal is to produce first-team players not neccessarily to win reserve team matches. If giving 16/17-year olds reserve team experience this term is going to help them develop as players than I'm all for it. It's also important to remember that probably our three brightest players in that age group (Campbell, Streete and Knight) were all missing yesterday.

yes think its a mixture of the youngsters and then the older ones are the ones being released, although you'd think they'd be busting a gut trying to impress any watching scouts that are present. It was exactly the same mix of players when Beardo was manager, the results were brilliant under him, ever since Donachie took over the results have been terrible, someone on here who i cant recall said that when they have been watching the reserves and Donachie has them playing long ball, and it doesn't suit the players at all. That's simply not true. Of our wins against Norwich (6-0), Swansea (5-3) and Liverpool (3-2) at the start of the season the only player who played in any them and yesterday was Michael Richardson. We're losing these games because were playing very young players at reserve team level. Hopefully this time next year when these players are a bit more physically developed we'll be performing better.

Danny Guthrie.

Looking on their forum it looks like Adam is out, Agger is highly doubtful and Johnson, Kelly and Bellamy are all doubtful. Would really fancy Ba, Cisse and Ben Arfa against a back four of Enrique, Skrtel, Carragher and Flangan.

Looking at the post I was a bit too critical on Krul himself. It is very much about the type of passing you play. However, the Stoke keepers who play a lot of long balls still manage to kick at over 52%. The problem we've got (which the second bit of my post eluded to) is that Williamson and Simpson are actually very poor passers of the ball. Williamson on Monday was an anamoly (87% pass sucess). His season average is 76.1% and Simpson's is 76.3%. This stops us from playing a short passing game as teams are simply going to press harder on Simpson and Williamson to push for the mistake

He's not a popular target of criticism on here but I honestly think some of our tactical problems start at the very back with Tim Krul. His kicking is very poor and that stats are there to back it up: Goalkeepers - Pass Success (%) Vorm – 68.5 Cech - 66.1 Szczesny – 65.6 Reina – 63.6 Friedel - 61.6 De Gea – 56.6 Hart – 52.2 Foster - 53.2 Howard – 50.1 Krul - 42 Krul averages 24 passes a game so in your average match Krul is going to give the ball away 14 times. It's not exactly tocket science that if you have a goalkeeper who consistently gives the ball away then were going to struggle to play passing fooball. This obviously isn't helped by the fact Danny Simspon and Mike Williamson have the two lowest pass completion rates of our back 8 (midfield + defence) which probably makes it difficult to ask Krul to play a short passing game. In contrast Colo and Santon are our two most successful passers so if we were to sign two players to play CB and RB who could pass a ball then we'd potentially significantly improve our side by giving us the option to play out from the back.

Lovely ball player but really needs to work on his defending. Got tore apart by Walcott at times in the first half and should have done much better on the cross for the first goal.

Tactically got it right tonight I thought. It was the players performances to blame. 4-4-1-1 worked fairly well first half. Not so well first 15 mins of second so had the guts to go 4-4-2. Not his fault that the players couldn't keep the ball for any sustained period.

Throw in was woeful but if he'd got up a bust a gut he'd have probably been in roughly the area Vermaelen was in.