Ronaldo

Simpson and Khiz were at the back for the Forest game man. These teams manage to score plenty goals when they're not facing our defence, more negative rubbish.

Christ, £2m? I'd be looking to bring either him or Ambrose here for the RW. Can you imagine how effective we'd be with 2 good wingers?

As easy as Derby? The worst team in Premiership histor took 4 points off us, that was out of a total of 11 points and they got them under Allardyce. Which games do you think we would we have won or drawn under Allardyce if we'd kept him? As I said a couple of hours back, the Derby games are powerful ammunition and it was only a matter of time before someone used them as such. We had some good results under Allardyce, as some want to forget. I've listed the games I think we'd have won or at the very least drawn under Sam.

Barton has blatantly been rushed back too many times. I really want him back in the team though, he's our best central midfielder by a distance.

We should have signed up Harewood as soon as his loan ended.

He kept his head down for the majority of his career because he knew he was never good enough to get away with off-field indiscretions.

I think the right conclusion has be made by the majority here. Isolate them and they're certainly good enough, factor in the shocking midfield and none of them will be able to look good.

You can't base the probability of us staying up that season on the points gained at the time he left. We'd played nearly all of our easy games by the time he'd left and we were not winning them. Our last 10 games under Allardyce brought us 2 wins, 3 draws and 5 defeats and 5 of our next 10 league games were against very good teams. Easy games? We had plenty 'easy' games left when Allardyce was sacked tbh.

"The terrorist is disorientated from the stun grenade, he doesn't know what's going on"

Love the avatar.

Weirdly my mate who's a Rovers fan thought he was worse than s**** for them and that Khiz would do much better for us / was better for them. He's still learning the game though, not had that much first team football yet. Warnock was a late-ish (ie about 24) bloomer too, there's plenty of time. Did Simpson not get sent home by Blackburn in January? We had this same conversation when Simpson originally signed. I for some daft reason thought he was on loan at the end of last season though.

Brilliant.

Bobby?

We had 5 home wins by Decemeber. With Bolton, Boro, B'burn, Fulham, Reading and Sunderland coming up I'm convinced we'd have surpassed the 40 point mark.

Keegan himself didn't manage any wins in those first few games. I'm not suggesting we would have done any better away to Arsenal or Villa or at home to Man U but we'd have taken points against the likes of Bolton, Boro, Blackburn, Reading, Sunderland and Fulham imo.

Far too much of this arguement comes down to pure speculation tbh. But i'm pretty confident that Allardyce would have comfortably got us past the 40 point mark.

Didn't Man U accept our bid a week ago?

Certainly. But, as I'm sure you agree, calling him corrupt is baseless. I thought Defoe fouled the keeper tbh. He gave him a tug across the shoulders and I assumed at the time that it was the reason the goal was disallowed. Aye, like Jermaine Defore muscled Reina to the ground. Anyway, I don't think Webb's corrupt but he's been shocking tonight and is generally a poor ref.

I think a lot of the fan's backlash against Allardyce was because of the way we played, as opposed to results. But folk now are trying to spin it as if it we weren't getting the results either. We were certainly getting enough to stay up, althought the Derby games are very powerful ammunition against that.

He was absolutely brilliant at his best and most certainly one of the top 3 in the premiership at that time.

Most people are thinking he would of took us down in 07-08. Just had a look at the table & we were not that far away points wise in 07-08. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%9308_Premier_League We got about 26 of those points under Allardyce though.

Does anybody on here actually think that Allardyce would have taken us down in 08-09 with the squad we actually had that season?

I hold my hands up about Milner. I wasn't wrong about his performances for us, but i was wrong about his potential. He looks a very, very good player right now and i hope he goes to the WC.

Sacking Allardyce let us to what some of us felt at the time was a very risky managerial appoinment for all the reasons that were vindicated 9 months later. I hate Allardyce as a manager and love Keegan. But the sacking of Allardyce cannot be called anything but a mistake imo because of the timing and the fact we didn't improve at all in terms of picking up points.