Andy

This is a flagrant breach of the forum's rules against duplicate accounts @Rich please IP ban yourself

D. If he left us I could only really see him going to a relegation threatened team. So he is squad filler for the majority of the league at best.

It's going to be a long road back for him if this is true. Assuming he next plays again in August, you're talking 18 months or so with basically no competitive football, having already looked pretty fucked at the start of 2024 from his previous injury. That is going to be difficult for any player to make a complete recovery from, not just physically but mentally.

At least next season's going to be great when we have no Europe to worry about, Botman is back, and the whole squad can stay relatively injury free

This feels like a huge blow. Tino will cover adequately defensively, but it will leave us looking blunt on both sides of the pitch with Gordon out too.

Barnes is a low C. He starts for the majority of premier league teams, but doesn't offer enough in general play to start for best teams.

He's somewhere between a B and C for me. Last season he was an easy B, this season he's been a C so far. Needs to sharpen up in his decision making and stop drifting in and out of games, for me.

They're just at a different stage to us and are riding a wave of momentum. Liverpool and Chelsea fans would have said the same about our players in 22/23. If Forest and Bournemouth proceed to sign basically no one for the next 2 years and the current managers are still there, I guarantee they won't have them anywhere close to being in contention for the CL places. Squad staleness is one of the biggest challenges a manager can face. And yeah, we could have signed the players mentioned, but it would have been at the expense of other players we needed a massive overhaul when Howe took over and doing even half a job of that has impacted us in the market in the last couple of seasons.

If you're doing a "which Forest players would get into our first team to justify why they're competing with us?" thing, you can't then say "well that one only gets in because we haven't got anyone better" that's literally the point surely?

Our recruitment has gone stale due to PSR, it's clear there are still huge holes in the squad, and the holes are only getting wider as some players age and others completely lose form. It isn't that the players we've signed haven't been good, it's that the job is half done. We have one right winger who is only good in patches. Two goalkeepers who are on the decline. Two centre halves who are on the decline. A back up right back who is now finished. A back up striker who is now finished. A back up left back who is on the decline. Back up midfielders who've either lost confidence or are 18 years old. These players are all being relied on regularly. Almost all of these players alluded to above were here under Bruce. The ones who weren't, were good temporary acquisitions (Pope, Burn, Trippier), but now need replacing. Howe has made mistakes this season and has a job on his hands to get the best out of what he's got, but the source of our problems goes back to the inability to strengthen further, which ultimately goes even further back to the years of neglect that left us with no saleable assets.

The squad should be judged on its quality for the purpose of comparison to the teams we're competing with, not its net cost. The manager is working with the players on a match day, not the balance sheet, and I doubt he was solely responsible for the majority of our signings (or lack thereof, in recent windows). On paper, are we really that much better than Bournemouth and Forest? Our best players are probably better, but our squad players are probably worse, certainly the ageing ones. I'd definitely trade a chunk of our players with theirs. Bournemouth and Forest are doing well this season, but can they maintain it and would their managers do any better than Howe with this particular set of players? I'm not convinced. Momentum is huge in football and they have it in abundance like we did in 2022/23 and like Villa did last season. Once the sheen wears off they'll both start to drop. If they maintain momentum until the end of the season and finish above us, it isn't representative of a failure Howe's part IMO.

If you're comparing to Forest, every club apart from Liverpool is failing as they're challenging for second place. Bournemouth have gone on a great run similar to what Palace did towards the end of last season. If they maintain it all the way through, fair play. Brighton beat us yesterday but have spent more time around midtable this season than the CL positions.

We're only below one of those teams in the table, to be fair. And we just beat them last week. Comparing spend would be more relevant if we were languishing miles behind them like Man Utd. Those teams are over performing and we're about on par.

For me, he's alongside Longstaff in the pecking order, it would be a coin toss over which one I'd start. That's quite damning on Willock though as I think he has a lot more ability, he just rarely uses it effectively nowadays. I thought he was "okay" today having said that. Just a bit frustrating as usual and wasteful, but at least he was trying to get us up the pitch.

The pass that led to their goal was poor, but nowhere near as poor as the defending that followed it.