Colos Short and Curlies

He was an A in the first couple of seasons, need to put him into context with the squad at that time. This season he's probably an asterisk with 'players must have played 6 games to be scored'

Still maintain no English club can afford Isak this summer. £160m transfer fee (minimum) plus 10-20% signing on fee plus around £20m in wages.

Can't see Isak starting this one with the final then next week. Need Wilson and Barnes to don their anti West Ham boots again

We do need to be doing business nice and early in the summer. It is true that Howe likes to bed players in to the club and system where possible and if we're going for a new GK, CB, RW and possibly CM then he needs the full pre season with them

There are 4 crazy seasons in there with 30 point gaps, take them and the BCD season out and you're looking at about 18 points average (its 21 with them included). I reckon by the time we get to May the gap will be nearer that than the 6 it currently is. City will go on a run and pick up 7 or 8 wins from the remaining 11, Forest have peaked and will pretty much spread the games across W/L/D, Bournemouth will do slightly better with maybe 5 wins, fuck knows with us, we could win 8 or lose 8 of the remaining games, Brighton and Fulham will do the same as Forest. Villa have a game less and are as erratic as we are

I agree its shady, but is really any different to speaking to agents of players who we want to bring in to replace those here now?

I think that's a nuts statement. If you start the season thinking City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Man U, Spurs, Chelsea are better teams/squads than us, putting 7th as out likely position and 2 of those 6 absolutely shit the bed in the season to be 14th/15th then 5th isn't an overachievement in the current season. The only other club you could put in there is Villa and they are having the season you would expect with the Champions League Finishing below Forest/Bournemouth or Brighton to miss out on CL would be an underachieving season, finishing 7th behind the 6 mentioned wouldn't

Is the Millwall keeper likely to get an extended ban or will he and Gordon both get 3 games? And is there any chance we can get Oliver reffing the Liverpool Soton game with a few soft reds please

I suppose the only glimmer of a positive today is that we won't get a fixture pile up now

You know that if was against us Barnes would be scoring the winner in the final and only there because of the red card here. Still not convinced it's a red with some of the challenges that didn't get a yellow, seemed a very high bar for a yellow then very little room to differentiate for a red

It's the flip side to an Isak when the club aren't ready for them. We're so reliant on him that we fall apart when he's not there. Need to build up the squad around him

Don't even need that tbh. Break even on the £24m and you can replace him with another £40m player without any impact on the SCR or FFP calcs.

That's ignoring the way referees now officiate though, a number of decisions referred to VAR would be dealt with differently if the ref was the only one able to make a decision.

Open air gladiators specials imo

Probably as good a game week as we could have expected, actually as good a final position after our last three games as we could have realistically hoped for