ikri

Made hard work of that & definitely weren't helped by some abysmal refereeing

This guy is horrific

Even when he scores he manages to hit the post. Great stuff from Murphy.

It's always worth remembering that he wasn't even under consideration for the job. The club had a 10 man shortlist for the job after Rafa left and every single one of them rejected us. Then, as he usually did, Lee Charnley did nothing. We were drifting up to the start of the season with no manager and no plans or ideas on who to hire. The club had had this happen twice before but had lucked out with Hughton already being at the club the first time and then Rafa asking for the job the second one. Bruce then contacted the club to offer his services and the club, with no one else interested in the job, accepted. Under any normal circumstances and under the ownership of anyone who gave even the slightest shit Bruce would have been laughed at for believing that he was capable of the job but under Ashley's disinterested absentee landlord style of ownership he got in and started to fester.

I'm still seething about the game against Chelsea back in 2011 where David Luiz committed a clear red card foul very early in the game but was saved by the referee who didn't want to ruin the spectacle with such an early sending off.

Really nice win, could/should have had a couple of penalties too.

Poor in defence, poor in the midfield and poor finishing up top. Totally predictable.

Nice win, could have been a few more if not for some excellent goalkeeping (where the hell was that Sels when he played for us?) and a referee completely unbothered about grappling in the box

I hope he has it in him for one last job when the Man Utd job comes up.

Very comfortable result

The really sad thing is that he's probably right. It doesn't say a lot for the quality of their other players in the last few decades.

Because referees don't like it and never wanted it. VAR undermines their belief that they're the infallible god on the pitch who don't make mistakes. Then along comes VAR and shows that they do make mistakes. Constantly. When every change that referees suggest makes VAR worse it's because they want rid of it. They want it to fail.

Seriously annoying game. I hate it when we sit back and invite pressure like that and the outcome feels inevitable.

Nice, comfortable win with some very well taken goals.

The poor attacking play is likely just down to how little time the team have had to train with Woltemade. He plays a very different game to Isak & Wilson and will take time for the rest of the team to adapt to his game, the midfielders and wingers need to know that they should be pushing up into the box when he holds the ball up. If it hadn't been for his injury I expect that Wissa would have been starting these games as his game closer to the one the team is used to and would have given time for the team to adapt to Woltemade.

The commentator was probably correct when they said that if the ref had given it as a pen it would have stood but there wasn't enough of a foul to warrant giving one when the ref had said no. If they'd called the ref over to the screen to watch in slow motion though I think he'd have given it.

Having an experienced head coach doing that job is always a huge risk. People would always be second guessing the manager's decisions and after every loss you'd have people saying well, Rafa would have done differently. It only works when the DoF wasn't as good a manager as the head coach.

Disappointing result but we were great in parts. Really does highlight, again, that we can't keep missing those gilt-edged chances early on.

That's a horrific lie and you know it. He fucks off to the Algarve.

Not a great performance but a win is a win

Isn't every sponsorship deal done at this level "bespoke"? It's not like most companies have an off-the-shelf sponsorship deal package waiting to be applied to willing clubs.

Amazing timing for England to organise themselves to score twice during the Bake Off ad break

It's a ridiculous argument. This isn't Field of Dreams, you can't just say If you build it, they will come. You're talking about spending upwards of £50m on increasing the capacity of a stadium that rarely fills out its existing capacity. Absolutely no one is going to do that and especially not a club renowned for having one of the lowest match day incomes in the league.

Some really poor performances in there, too many.

From Mainoo's point of view a loan makes the most sense. He's not in the manager's current plans but the manager will likely be gone before his contract is up. If he goes on loan then he can see who the next manager is and find out if he's likely to be in their plans next season and make his decision from there.