Yorkie

They're having a brilliant season and fair play to them. The neutral in me is pleased to see them doing well despite the financial restrictions put upon them (or rather, the lack of financial restrictions put upon their competitors). But it's no stick to beat Howe with because despite us sharing that place in the hierarchy, each club's situations are different.

Villa's incredible season doesn't mean every mitigating factor which applies to us isn't true. Equally, all of those mitigating factors aren't the sole reason for why we're as low as 13th. Villa and Emery are third therefore Newcastle and Howe should be third is a bit of a stupid take really.

The lack of a DoF wasn't the principal reason for why we stumbled in the summer. You know my view on what is number one and all the executives in the world wouldn't remedy that.

... No? But if we win a trophy it would be magnificent. I'm here for trophies, like.

If, for the first time since the 1950s, we defended a trophy - you'd probably accept a league campaign where we didn't pull up any trees but were competitive and comfortable? Sounds like your expectations are very grounded.

Agreed. I wish we'd capitalised on one of the several good opportunities we'd made for ourselves after those subs.

This isn't what is being argued at all as far as I can see. It's not "who is to blame, Howe or the summer?" It's an observation of the whole. Howe isn't getting us going this season for various reasons, but factoring-in the mitigating factors of the summer and injuries, you can afford some leeway. Even regardless of 'credit in the bank.'

Eh? Pathetic? Woltemade was absolutely rubbish last night. Spent the game observing balls fly across him, punctuated with the ball occasionally bouncing off him. There wasn't a thing wrong with the service to him. For all the criticism of the subs, we continued to play the game in their first third and all the best chances happened once they'd been made. Wissa scores if Barnes doesn't inexplicably pull it back for Gordon.

Mitigating circumstances effect everything because they take away time and resources from your ability to do or prepare your own job properly. I think it's something a lot of us will have experienced in our own jobs. If you don't think a huge squad turnover, selling the focal point of your attack, having no CEO, no DoF, and being told to sort out the transfer window isn't going to have an impact on the time, thought, and effort you can put into your own job, then I have a bridge to sell you. There's definitely a bit of a chain reaction too. I'll remove last night as the final link because we were alright and worth a point imo, but it's a fair point that we shouldn't have been as awful as we were against Sunderland, regardless of mitigation. However, the executive upheaval, the PSR limitations and then the Isak saga impacted our ability to reshape the squad as intended, which is a fundamental 'why' in terms of our league struggles. Even getting all the same players - but much earlier in the summer - would have helped and made us far less dysfunctional. The other mitigation you haven't mentioned is injuries. We've been hammered again injuries-wise; Tino, Hall and especially Wissa all sharing the treatment room at the same time has been a nightmare for us, and we still can't get all of them on the pitch together. It doesn't excuse everything, like I say, but there's definitely mitigation. I don't believe it would happen but if, say, we lost at Burnley and we pulled the trigger, it would be desperately harsh.

Just a load of guesswork and conjecture, basically. We'll see in time if Wissa represents value for money. Ramsey hasn't looked woeful either, though he had a bad half an hour last night.

Oh good, televised. If we play like we did for most of the game against Man Utd we'll probably get a result but there's just no guarantee we'll play anything close to decent. The manager will probably be in hot water if we lose again, so the pressure is definitely on.

The comments about him being lively, okay, etc are totally fair imo - as were Howe's comments about him being one of our better players, at least in build-up play. People just have Gordon in their crosshairs and have done all season, because of this perception that he thinks he's better than he is or doesn't try hard, or is cowardly, however it's put. I don't really see the evidence of that sort of thing, just a player who cannot find any consistency at all. Certainly didn't see a lack of application from him last night, he was trying to make things happen all game. For eg he was LW but the chances which fell to him were both from the right of the box. It's not like he's hiding out on the wing. Said it before but if he didn't have floppy hair and wasn't a Scouser I think he'd cop about 50% of the flack he does.

With hindsight I don't even think the idea of a one-year extension for Wilson was that mental. Not going to pretend he didn't look finished last season but those rumours were before we knew anything about Isak. Clearly we knew the prospect of him going was a real one and there were also potential suitors for Osula. Retaining Wilson was clearly just a contingency plan in the event things went south, rather than a demonstration of ludicrous amounts of loyalty imo.

I swear you can't have been following the summer at all; I think we had a crack at just about every striker on the market. It was obviously a priority and we tried to sign one as early as possible but couldn't; first because PSR meant Delap, Pedro, Ekitike and Sesko all went elsewhere, and later because the Isak saga gave us absolutely zero leverage until the situation was resolved. I'm not even sure what counterpoint you're making re Pedro; all I'm saying is, if we'd signed him, things would've been different. Your initial take was that we waited forever to make a signing; that's just complete nonsense. Save for targeting much less coveted players, we were as proactive as we could possibly be when it came to signing a striker.

Why is Wissa getting bundled in? He couldn't get into it tonight but beyond that he's looked sharp and scored.

In what world did we 'sit and wait' for anyone, let alone Wissa (who we were putting bids in for well over a month before he actually signed, btw)? Said it a bunch of times but the turning point was Pedro. He was coming here in the middle of June and then Chelsea blew us out the water with the wages offer. With that one secured out whole transfer window looks completely different.

what a load of rubbish, man. We were in the market for strikers from the word go and when we lost the first targets, the Isak situation totally castrated us until Liverpool finally made a fair offer. The stuff about his international duties is a ridiculous criticism and always has been.

I'm certainly not defending our away performances or the fact we're as low in the table as we are, but surely there's a pretty massive asterisk against this, given what we lost? We'd only invested a relatively small amount (Elanga) before our recruitment became about just trying to stay in the mix, as opposed to building on our position.

Jacob Murphy - who struggled for years has been (for absolutely ages now) a really dependable player for us. Someone help me up, I wasn't ready for this groundbreaking news! Fwiw Gordon and Barnes both have better numbers than him this year.

He missed a couple of simple passes and did badly with a couple of efforts, ultimately earning his performance a thumbs down, but it's a shame because I thought a lot of what he did was pretty positive. He and Hall linked well and he was trouble down their right-hand-side throughout the second half. End product was infuriatingly shite but don't agree about a lack of application or phoning it in, thought he tried hard to make things happen for us. I'm generally quite forgiving of Gordon but definitely starting to think it could be in everyone's best interests if we could find a buyer. It'll be annoying seeing him tear it up for someone else, mind.

I think we're just a bit fucked as far as the goalie department is concerned. Pope does make key saves but has a howler in him, and does have the odd one where you're like "he should do better" (his attempt at saving Paqueta's effort was worse than Ramsdale's from Dorgu, for instance). But Ramsdale is clearly no upgrade and his passing ability doesn't outweigh his so-so shot-stopping ability. It's probably the position most desperate for an upgrade imo. We could improve on Gordon for instance but if we don't sort the keeper situation out, we won't break through our ceiling.

I don't know how xG is calculated (that's not to say I don't value it as a statistic), but I assume the moment where Barnes cut it back for Gordon isn't reflected by the high figure it would've been, had it been played to Wissa instead. Miley and Gordon's are the other ones, like you say. I don't really want to go overboard and have my comments mistaken for saying we played well or that the manager deserves a reprieve for another dismal loss. I just think we're a composed finish away from us all feeling significantly better. That's worlds apart from West Ham, Brentford and Sunderland, which were all truly abominable.

I don't agree with Rod saying we were 'very good' because clearly we weren't, but this isn't true either. It was easily the best we've played against a low block (against an extremely low bar) because we worked it into the box several times and got in behind down the left wing. It's maddening because I think if we get the equaliser, I think most on here say we deserve it and it's a green shoot in terms of our away form. The Barnes cut-back for Gordon is the one. Such a dreadful decision from the lad not to just either shoot or roll it into Wissa.

Find tonight difficult to assess personally. It's another dreadful result and the performance ultimately wasn't good enough, but I think he was let down by poor finishing more than anything. Lack of goals has been our biggest problem all season (I attribute the late equalisers to that issue, for instance) but tonight we did enough to put at least one away, but couldn't. Don't think there's any fresh conclusions to draw really. We're hopeless on the road and saying we were better than we were against Sunderland is just damning with faint praise. Just another game where the evidence suggests he hasn't fixed the problem and therefore he's accountable to the continuation.

We should be performing better but losing Isak has had a monumental impact. The way it impacted the transfer window was one thing but we also didn't play with a competent striker until the fourth game of the season because of it, denying us any early momentum. We might come through this situation but there's a very good chance that the history books will show the Isak saga as the moment the curve suddenly turned downwards. How far the line falls is where you criticise/praise the club.