Andy

He has some good attributes, but he seems to not have a clue what to do once he gets in the final third. His passing falls to pieces, he rarely looks like scoring. It's difficult to tell what his best position is tbh. He's strong and good at breaking up play, but he doesn't look like a natural DM, and he doesn't have the end product for a box to box or attacking midfielder. He's approaching 40 appearances for us now, you'd expect at least a little bit of output at this point.

The energy levels were definitely the most annoying aspect tonight. You can forgive us being a bit sloppy when we have some pretty average footballers plugging holes, but they were first to every ball and looked more hungry. This has been the case over and over again this season away from home, from the very start.

Literally put anyone in midfield instead of Longstaff. He is clearly shot for confidence and hiding. Honestly think you could put Dan Burn in there and he'd offer more.

Thought Longstaff could've stayed on his feet tbh, he's hiding at the minute and would rather go down than try to get a shot away

Said it the other day, it's pointless worrying about other results when we are this inconsistent. I know this one isn't done yet but we've been poor against teams in the bottom half far too many times this season.

Our defenders in particular are taking too many touches every time they have the ball, really slow and sloppy

Hopefully we have turned a corner with the last couple of results, but I'm more worried about our own consistency than I am the fixtures and results of the clubs around us. We've been canny wank in games you'd expect us to win this season Have a feeling we'll finish 7th

What happened to the whole "the contact continues into the box" shite from literally the other week

Great first half that, hopefully we can keep it going. The system is working perfectly.

If Tino is fit to start, I wouldn't be surprised if Krafth is right back, Tino left back tbh. Hall on the bench.

Excellent refereeing that like, 99% of refs would've made the easy call to just give the home team a penalty there

This would be nice but I don't think Howe will do it, probably weakens our options off the bench a bit too much.

I think it's at least partially because the defensive line isn't right due to Pope being out too. We aren't able to compress the play as much and we end up with defenders being isolated. I think width has become a bigger element of the game in the PL in general again this season too, it seems like every team has a rapid right winger now, probably to exploit the fact that most of the LBs in the league are shite.

He played like a 19 year old who has started in that position a handful of times in his career. He has the toolset, he just needs the experience, especially when it comes to judging when to press and when to jockey.

That's never ever a foul for me like, certainly not enough to overrule the on field decision.

Darren Ambrose isn't it?

He did aye. He doesn't do it consistently though. Any midfielder in the country can do it once in a while coming off the bench.

Give him a run in the team until the end of the season, let him find his feet (assuming they haven't fell off). Looks a talent and just needs some experience in the position, he has all the attributes to be a top full back.

Was the kind of challenge you'd expect to see from a young defender, not an old head. Really stupid.

Not sure how I feel about him still. His physicality is good and he is decent at driving with the ball at times, but I feel like he doesn't take the game by the scruff of the neck enough and doesn't really take as many risks as you'd want in the final third, both on and off the ball. I thought we looked more disjointed when he went off like, having said that.

The backline we had out when Hall went off is relegation battle material, not really a shock that we couldn't hang on to a clean sheet. Annoying how it happened though.

Heard Howe wants to play him at LB to keep Hall out the team, pass it on

By "not on it", I mean in front of goal. If he's low on confidence or missing chances he can look otherwise fairly average, we saw this a bit during his last couple of games prior to his most recent injury, and he's definitely had spells like that for Leicester too. He'll always drift in and out of games, but fan opinion of him will sway up and down based on his confidence in front of goal imo. Definitely not a criticism as I like a purely-effective winger (hence the Robert comparison in my previous post), but I think we'll see very polarised takes on him in this thread during his time here.

My brother is a Leicester fan and I've watched quite a bit of him, for me he's always been prone to drifting in and out over 90 minutes, especially when he's off form. He's more than a finisher in that he also has great movement (particularly with a give and go), but when he isn't "on it" he can sometimes be anonymous, he isn't ever going to dribble past four players or work as hard as someone like Gordon/Almiron defensively. I think over time he will sometimes split opinion because of this in the same way someone like Laurent Robert used to. We bought him for end product and he's delivering on that so far imo.

Not saying you're wrong, but that argument would hold more water for me if the rest of our "trusted" defenders weren't turning in catastrophic performances week in week out If that's been Howe's thinking, it doesn't really make much sense