Andy

Leverkusen first half and a couple of early sub appearances aside, Thiaw has been as good as I've seen from a center half for us to be honest.

Only if we're hell-bent on changing our identity and style as we seem to be. Our strongest XI is one of the best in the league at playing the way we have done in previous seasons.

I respect your positive thought process, but on the other hand you can't expect to come on a forum and only read blind optimism, which is effectively what it would be if we were being positive about Elanga based on his displays so far. People will react emotionally, especially after a pathetic derby defeat where we didn't show up and Elanga looked like he couldn't trap a football for the umpteenth time this season. I don't think too much of the criticism has been unfair or overly harsh to be honest. It's not his fault he's been shite so far or that he's being picked, but he's going to take flack if he isn't delivering, especially when he cost the club £55m during a PSR crisis and is being paid handsomely himself in the process, just as Isak is taking flack at Liverpool. If his mentality is so fragile that he can't dig in and turn around his form because he's being criticised online, he's in the wrong profession.

Get what you're saying, but if a club signed Joe Willock off us and he immediately struggled to find form due to injuries, even unrelated to injuries he'd had previously, we'd all think "how the fuck didn't they see that coming?" Whether it's bad luck or a genetic disposition to suffer more injuries (or literally just being less inclined to play through knocks that other players would play through), it's just a fact that injury prone players only tend to become more and more injury prone as they get older, it rarely goes in the other direction.

You have personally let me down by thinking that

He still has a track record for picking them up, some players are just like that. This all an aside to the wider point I was making anyway (since Ian responded to the least relevant part of my post), which is that he has never been the style of player that I felt we needed, and that we shouldn't be signing players with a reliance on them being "Howe'd". His performances so far when he's been available have reinforced that.

If you sign a player with a track record for struggling with injuries, and he gets injured, the signing is up for scrutiny. The squad has been let down by him being unavailable and it has impacted our results, whether it's on purpose or not is completely irrelevant to the debate.

Yeah but he's been at the club for half a season. The reason he hasn't featured more is the same reason he struggled at Villa for the last two seasons, so while it's a mitigating factor, it's also a valid criticism of our recruitment that we've signed a player who has struggled with form due to fitness and injuries, and then he's let us down by being unavailable due to fitness and injuries. It's also known what kind of player he is, he isn't an unknown quantity, so it's valid to say "I don't think he's what we needed".

I'm not saying we should judge quickly, but passing judgement on their contribution after half a season is reasonable when they're contributing to our poor form (or in the case of Ramsey, not contributing towards improving our form). Ramsey and Elanga aren't the same, I agree, but they have different problems. Ramsey was clearly a risk given his injury record and hit and miss form in recent years, and he also looks a bit of a bad fit for the way we're trying to play to me. He's had enough time at the club now to at least show SOMETHING, but all I've seen from him is: "looks tidy", which isn't really what we need at the moment. I think most of us would agree that we either needed a traditional "6" or a midfielder with a bit guile and creativity. It's more that he looks the wrong profile to me than that he's necessarily been bad on the pitch.

Ramsey isn't a kid like Hall though, he's an experienced premier league player who should really be making more of an impact than he has for the money involved. Granted injuries haven't helped, but injuries hadn't helped him at Villa either, so that becomes less forgivable as an excuse IMO.

Surely not, I agree. However, we can't just criticise fans for "writing them off" based on nothing other than fact that Howe has made other players better, that isn't really a sensible approach to critiquing our recruitment.

Well exactly Ian, therefore their performances are open to criticism based on what they've done so far. We can't have a mentality of refusing to judge players until they've been at the club long enough for Howe to wave a magic wand at them.

Got no doubt they could both become good for us given time, but people are judging them on what they're contributing in games here and now, which is what they were signed for. We aren't really in a position where we can afford to spend £95,000,000 on two players in their mid 20s who both need to be "Howe'd" before they're able to contribute literally anything worthwhile to the first team whatsoever.

This defeat definitely feels like a critical moment not just in Howe's tenure here but possibly in his career. I can't remember him ever being under a serious level of scrutiny even when things went wrong at Bournemouth; not that it's exactly Ange or Amorim levels of criticism at the moment, but it's enough to see what he and his players are made of. As you say, hopefully the reaction to the derby is what we need to get some of our fighting mentality back.

To be honest the biggest concern I have with Howe is that we seem to find ourselves in this position each season, it always seems to need fixing rather than just being right to begin with. The worry is that sooner or later, he might not be able to fix it or find the answer, or he might not continue to have the buy-in from the players even if he has the answers. I'm worried that we're seeing signs of that at the moment. If we're trying to reinvent ourselves as he says, there really aren't any signs of it on the pitch. At least not convincing signs, anyway.

The Robson saga is difficult to compare as, with the benefit of hindsight, we know it was punctuated by a sequence of abysmal appointments after he left. I don't think very many of the fans who thought it was time for him to step aside expected or wanted Souness to be the replacement, nor would I expect a Souness level replacement from the current board once Howe eventually leaves.

And he's right, but the games we choose to do it in are often the wrong ones. Pressing like mad against Liverpool, Arsenal, Barcelona and City isn't much good if we just lay down arms against our local rivals. It suggests the priorities are wrong to an extent if we only play with intensity against the big sides, rather than against the sides whose intensity we need to match, or the sides we should be looking to blow away. I also think our squad is in a position now where we should be able to cope with the demands better than we could two years ago, and if it isn't, then we've failed to prepare adequately.

Called Bruno a soft snowflake cunt in the quotes I saw

And Hall.

We don't need to play like it every game tbf, but if there was ever a time to show that we still have that edge and intensity to our game, yesterday was it. Not only was it a chance to put our recent league derby record right, it was a chance to put ourselves in a much stronger league position going into the Christmas fixtures. We just completely blew it. Sunderland were first to every ball and made up for their obvious limitations by battling like it was their cup final, as we all knew they would. We battled like it was our FA Cup third round, as unfortunately we all suspected we would.

Even when Gordon has raised his game, his best games have still been worse than Barnes' best games this season, and his other performances have been significantly worse. Stat-padding with penalties won't change my mind on that. There's really no way to justify shoving Barnes to the right to accommodate Gordon midweek then dropping him altogether yesterday. Much like the second half of last season, we look a much better and more dangerous team with Barnes on the left to me.

Getting a proper structure in place is absolutely the main thing, particularly around recruitment, and that means Eddie accepting that he may need to be more hands-off with it too. Yes he should have a say, but there's a reason the elite clubs have moved away from the head coach identifying targets. I want him devoting his time and energy to our squad and our opponents not the transfer market. We've been a shambles in that department since Ashworth left and this season it has finally come back to bite us. Hopefully we can improve moving forward now that we have a (hopefully competent) sporting director in place again.

There should always be a succession plan to be fair, Howe could resign next week for personal reasons or to go to another club (unlikely, but still), it would be amateurish if we didn't have a plan in place at all times for him leaving given how quickly things can change in football.

Our centre backs have taken deep starting positions all season. I assumed it was because of the fullbacks being out, now we're wondering if it's because Pope is out. In reality, we're just setting up way too negatively in a lot of games and struggling to get up the pitch in a sustained way.

It was the same away performance we've given in every game other than Everton. I've no doubt the mackems will drop off eventually, but they play with much more desire than us and are more solid - stats also back this up. We're a better team on paper and SHOULD be finishing above them, but we're not showing anything on the pitch at the moment to give me the same confidence that you have. If we're that passive and limp in a derby, how can we have confidence that we'll show up for the rest of our away games this season (most of which are difficult)? We just don't seem to have the mentality to put a run together like we have in previous seasons. Every time we look like we're back, it turns out to be a false start.