Mick

So you think we play better with 10 men than 11, different if nothing else.

I think the injury is actually a good thing for Obertan as it will take him out of the firing line. Another poor game at home and he would get slaughtered, a break might do him good.

In the space of 9 minutes I've gone from having a little hope that we might do something different to this.

It's sad when you are glad to have a player injured but in this case, good.

You're far too sensitive towards Pardew and I think you will find most people were reasonably happy with the way we performed against Man City even in defeat. I don't see why him turning around a 1-3 defeat into a 1-0 win would have had people having a go at him.

As runners up we were actually the second top side.

The agenda card.

Pardew fills the media full of shit to keep them on his side, as long as they get column inches they couldn't give a shit what they print.

Strange, I thought that was the point of the thread in the first place.

He's done nothing in the 18 months before today, he hasn't seemed that interested in playing for a while but he might change. I doubt many clubs would be daft enough to take a gamble on him so for me he does it at Villa or doesn't do it at all.

Happy New Year everybody, I hope everybody has a good 2012.

No, he's brilliant because he's scored 1 goal in 2 years. What do you think of him?

His injury was a 4 month recovery and Pardew (I know) said earlier this week in The Journal that he was due back in March.

Marveaux should be playing again towards the end of March.

I remeber Dyer was brilliant at defending a post.

Has anybody other than Krul cleared off our line more than Simpson this season? My guess is that they haven't but that seems to have been forgotten by most people.

That was brilliantly crap, he ran at the stationary ref and lost the ball and just looked at him as if the ref came from nowhere.

I've been saying that throughout the season and got stick for it, we're going to struggle to change in now after so many games and when the confidence is shot.

I had hoped that he was trying to get our £3 million back off Man U.

We have a small squad but we also do have options and we're not fully utilising them and that's down to Pardew. Santon is clearly a better player than Ryan Taylor and Ben Arfa is almost certainly better than Obertan. We don't know that anything will automatically improve us, we do know that certain things which we are repeatedly doing are not working so we need to do something different. If I try something that doesn't work I usually do something different next time in the hope that the end result is different, why should Pardew be any different? We’ve also got Jonas who now looks completely burnt out because of the work he’s had to do, work that he wouldn’t have had to do if he’d had Santon behind him. What’s wrong with dropping Jonas for Ferguson against a couple of the lesser sides to re-charge his batteries? What has playing the long ball got to do with our squad size? The answer is nothing and the manager is either encouraging us to bypass what should be a strength or he’s allowing it to happen. At one point yesterday we put something like 30 passes together so we’re more than capable of doing it yet we’re not and that is bordering on madness. If we can put 30 passes together against Liverpool at Anfield then we should be able to do it against lesser teams, we’re not and that has nothing to do with the standard of our players who can do it.

Maybe the manager hasn't told them to hoof the ball long, I have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that he's told them no to do it and that's his job.

It doesn't matter what people were expecting of this season before a ball was kicked because expectations change over time. I doubt that many expected us to go down at the start of 2008/09 season but as the season went on people’s expectations changed and it wasn't much of a surprise at the end. This season is different and instead of performing below expectation we've gone the other way and performed better than most will have hoped, at least points wise. Since Bonfire night we’ve won one game and that’s now close to two months and I doubt even the worst pessimists would have expected that we’d go two months with 1 win, did you? Even earlier when we were winning we were getting a lot of luck and people were going on about Pardew being a good manager. Now the results are not going our way it’s only right that people express concerns at the way things are going. I don’t think the team are playing that much worse (yesterday aside) than we were when winning and we’ve rarely seen a change in our game even though Pardew said our style was going to change. From time to time we do try to play football on the deck but for far too long we’ve bypassed the midfield by just hoofing the ball from back to front. For far too long we’ve played players who are not performing while potentially better players have been left on the bench and now we’re not getting results people are rightly questioning those decisions. You can accept any s**** that's served up without questioning it, that doesn't mean other should do the same. As for my expectations, I think we'll probably end up between 10th and 8th which will be a couple of places better than my original hopes for the season. I also think our team is capable of finishing slightly higher but they’ll not do it because of the points lost due to managerial decisions.

I'm not defending him in here and have said that yesterday was was easily his worst performance, I just don't think he's our current worst defender.

Are you trying to say that Jonas isn't doing extra work covering for Taylor? Also, the clown as you put it has as many league assists and a goal more than the bloke on the other wing who couldn't defend to save his life.