Mick

Under Allardyce in 07/08 we only won 2 games against teams who finished in the top half of the league and they were both home games, Everton who finished 5th and West Ham who finished 10th.

Same question to you, in your opinion, which games would we have drawn or won under Allardyce?

As easy as Derby? The worst team in Premiership histor took 4 points off us, that was out of a total of 11 points and they got them under Allardyce. Which games do you think we would we have won or drawn under Allardyce if we'd kept him?

You can't base the probability of us staying up that season on the points gained at the time he left. We'd played nearly all of our easy games by the time he'd left and we were not winning them. Our last 10 games under Allardyce brought us 2 wins, 3 draws and 5 defeats and 5 of our next 10 league games were against very good teams.

No, he would have done it a year earlier.

I think we would have gone down it we'd kept Allardyce, we had a nightmare set of games coming up and our players had zero confidence and he was never going to give them a lift. I can't remember a single player who was performing for him at the end and we had a few away playing in Africa so we were down on numbers.

They were no worse for the second than Nolan and Shola for the first.

I've just seen that on tele, he looked really emotional and I don't think I've felt happier for a goal scorer in years.

Hughton wanted the managers job, he wasn't dumped into it, he made the choice. We do have problems further up and we do need players, that doesn't change the fact that Hughton isn't very good. The cracks that you mention have been visible all season and are not down to players returing to the clubs they came from, they are down to Hughton allowing the cracks to remain without doing anything about them. Who are these injured players that are starting to mount up?

You confuse vindication with poor judgement. I would have played Guthrie in the middle in place of either Smith or Nolan and I would play LuaLua on the wing and Ranger in place of Shola along side Lovenkrands. Speed and stamina isn’t everything, you also need balance and our lack of it is as glaring as our lack of pace in the middle.

Hughton isn't a good manager, some people understand that, others seem to take league position as some sort of vindication of his position and the job he's doing.

I would guess that 90% of the teams in this division would take our bench if offered it.

He does make goals from the right but he seems to spend most of his time away from the right, I might time him against Palace to see if I'm wrong.

Class.

That's unlikely as we've had the perfect opportunity to play him in the middle when Simth was injured and we brought in Nicky Butt.

His natural position isn't on the right, he spends more time away from the right than he does on it. If it was his natural position he wouldn't spend so much time away from it.

I feel sorry for Simpson, on the other side of the pitch we have two players who work well together. On the right we have Simpson and a big empty space in front of him, I felt sorry for him tonight as Guthrie went missing far too often.

He's always been like that, he's got no stamina for somebody of his age.

I expect he'll (Shola) be rolling the hip injury out at the end of the season to justify being crap.

I'm not big fan of Carroll but to be fair to him, we were in the last 10 or 15 minutes and trying to get a winner.

The game just seems to pass him by, it's as if he's watching tumbleweed just blowing past him.

A forward who has played over 200 games and averages a goal roughly every 5 games hasn't got a lot to shout about.

We were lucky again, he did nothing to change the game.

Agreed, he's a terrible footballer and spends more time holding opposition players than doing anything positive.