Lenny

Also well done for him for putting that interviewer in his place regarding Joelinton. Amusing comment at face value but actually extremely disrespectful and unprofessional comment to make.

You literally questioned his decision making in your post, hence me raising the point that his decision making was spot on at a critical time in the game. He should be sacked off at the earliest opportunity based on his last few years with us, but there was nothing wrong with his decision making and positional play today, and he was better than "minimum level required".

His pass for the first goal was very assertive. 99% of the time a player in our shirt takes one touch too many before making the pass, and thus nullifying the chance.

If you want to compare the players at their best, then Dubs is still above Krul IMO. A critical attribute of a keeper is consistency; Dubs was comfortably our most complete keeper (as far back as I've been watching ~95) for a good 18 months after he'd signed. I really liked Krul, but I'm not sure he had a spell at his best for that long, and equally, Krul had some significant weaknesses in his game whereas Dubs is far more rounded/complete. It's a little more difficult to gauge where he is right now with the frequency of injury, which is a reason to look for another keeper.

What a load of nonsense.

I personally think Dubravka is a more complete keeper than all of those.

I'm personally more than happy to accept someone's opinion of Joselu being that of a player in the same bracket as the likes of Riviere, Andersson, De Jong and Kuqi. But for an objectively average start that exceeded the minimal expectation placed on him, I think he was absolutely dreadful for us, particularly given the number of games he played. He really wasn't a good target man either; nothing stuck to him and he couldn't direct a header. You only had to see how significant an improvement there was across the whole team when Rondon got into his stride - he was a good target man.

The players are just not good enough. No massive lack of effort, most are just not good enough. We should be throwing relegation release clauses and massive contracts at players to get them in 1st Jan, and even then they need to hit the ground running

So... Are you allowed to hand ball providing your arms are by your side? The interception by the Wolves defender there was deliberately by his arm regardless of whether it was by his side or not. He's leant in to stop it,with his arm.

Because of this bit I always pronounce Coquelin "Car quellen"

I think a lot of our attacking players will be guilty of over thinking things at the moment, particularly whilst they've been chasing a first win. Hopefully if we can get a couple more wins the players will relax (in the right manner) and the belief will see them improve.

Every decision a manager makes carries a risk and potential reward. He brought his defensive substitute on to perform a defensive task. Unfortunately the player didn't do the job well enough. Unfortunately we don't have any quality options so the risk is heightened, but given how gassed the players were we needed to bring on a defensive player.

The players were absolutely fucked by 70 minutes. It would have been madness to not bring on legs (Almiron) and defensive attributes (Hayden).

Strange, I thought all of the subs seemed the smart, logical decisions.

Minimal consideration of context seems to have gone into this post.

What a beast he was today. Superb.

Personally I think he's a good footballer and a poor athlete, with a bad attitude to boot. As much as I dislike him, IMO to say he can only ping a ball is a bit of a disservice to him. He's pretty good at most of the technical elements of the game; his close control under pressure is pretty decent and is often able to manoeuvre himself well enough to retain the ball. He can certainly see a pass under pressure and make it, be it short or long - which is more of a skill IMO than just being able to "ping it".

He's got one of the worst mentalities I can recall seeing in a professional footballer. He has a proper defeatist attitude (see his comments within days of the takeover happening "well I guess I won't be here" or something to that effect), cannot take any criticism and cannot maintain his temper when he's singled out, be it by fans, opposition players or in fact anyone. You could see him mouthing back to a fan (or possibly some staff on the sidelines) even in our last game and I'm sure at one point he snapped towards one of our players (possibly ASM). He's absolutely not the kind of personality you want in a squad. We do, unfortunately, need him now though.

Who would have thought that playing 3 defensive clogger centre backs and two deep lying midfielders would result in a thoroughly unambitious performance. Pathetic as usual - Howe has some job to do.

Would have taken him from the start, and happy to get behind him now. He may unfortunately need more time than he has to wake the players from the slumber Bruce has put them in but we shall see. There's certainly more to work with from them than what's being shown. First target is obviously to just at least be within a few points of safety by the time we can spend some money.

What I will say, as shit as that was it's nice to feel the wont to constructively talk about it rather than just erase it from my mind.

Not sure I'm denying anything to be honest, but your opinion is as valid as mine

I'm not going to get into overly praising anything about that performance but I like to think I can be balanced in my view of particular events, even if the end result is piss poor. Until the first goal we had been relatively organised and were frustrating them into taking long shots. Don't interpret that as me being happy in anyway however and as I said though that was totally at the expense of attacking intent, and their manager reacted tactically and found us out.

For what it's worth, we were resolute-ish until the first goal, but it was entirely at the expense of any attacking intent and there was absolutely no response plan for when we inevitably go behind. Their manager found a solution by overloading the fullbacks, and our manager had no answer which was reflected in the utter mess of a performance from that point on. The players overall are not up to standard but there's far more to be had from them.

There is very little to suggest there's any good coaching going on with these players. What constitutes good coaching because today's response to going a goal down has no positive reflection on our coaching. The players either went a goal down and didn't execute a response plan that was asked of them, or the players did exactly what was asked of them. Either of those don't suggest good coaching.