AyeDubbleYoo

The idea he’s just playing the same way all the time is just wrong. Against Brighton there were noticeable and major improvements in the combinations between midfield and attack.

I think Guehi is on a different level to Elanga TBF.

Yeah fair enough, but that is the position that’s the clearest weakness in the first team. Apart from that everybody in the first team is a quality player. When Botman returns anyway. I don’t have high expectations for Jan anyway.

I wouldn’t say transition is stale though, it’s a period of great change. It just doesn’t show immediate results. Personally I feel like a lot has been happening even though the big announcements haven’t been made on things like stadium.

If I could double my wages to move across the road I would be tempted.

I guess it’ll feel stale until it doesn’t, unless we have inside knowledge of the workings. We appointed a performance director and a new director of football, two major shareholders left. There’s obviously activity behind the scenes.

He obviously had some unfortunate thinking going on if he chose Chelsea, both due to the fact they’re chaos and the fact they’ve got loads of CBs. He obviously preferred something other than pure football in his decision-making process, which is fair enough and up to him. Whether it’s location, easy life, finances or whatever.

Think it’s important to note that progressing doesn’t mean finishing at least one position higher every season.

I can’t see it at all.

He kind of looks back and rolls over to catch up to the ball as well.

I’m surprised we went for Elanga and I’m not sure how genuine it was given it was so last minute. He’s a completely different profile from Olise and nowhere near the same quality level. I’m pretty sure we won’t go back for him now.

I think if we have £70m we should spend it on a RW now. It’s the only weakness left in the team for the way we want to play. Not sure we’ll be able to get the right person in Jan though.

Ah fair enough, yeah. But I’m sure we’re aware of the need for data-driven cheaper signings, I think there was an Athletic article last week about our plans for that but I can’t read it because of the pay wall. My point was more that everyone seems to be gutted that we didn’t sell a big player or we’re not great sellers like Villa and Brighton. But our players and squad are very different to Brighton’s at the moment, and every top player we sell could mean real reductions in our points total. I’ve waited 15 years for a football club I’m not ashamed of. People seem to have adapted to the situation and started asking for more remarkably quickly. Forgetting about what we’ve already achieved from an unbelievably low starting point.

I can’t think of a clearer case for changing a decision TBH. Football has a real problem with penalties anyway TBH. In a low-scoring sport getting a free goal is way too important. Games are being decided by a decision to give or not give a penalty, and the players are obviously trying their best to deceive the officials all the time.

I was talking about our transfer policy, not sure how this relates. Yeah we need to grow our commercial revenue, of course.

Well OK, but this is a circular debate then. That means we would need a young 3rd striker but who’s also proven and has no doubts about easing him in. That’s back to the old ‘how would we get that person to be third choice’ again. I find with a lot of these debates, there’s clearly a logical explanation but pundits just prefer to ask the questions even though we already know the answer. It’s a bit odd.

We’re getting everything in place, we need to be patient. Our transfer policy was suitable for the position we were in and the people we had in post. We went from relegation battle to the champions league FFS, how good to we want our transfer policy to be? Our valuable players are essential to our team. Sell Bruno, spend the money, still finish lower in the table. That’s a strong possibility. It’s not like Brighton where every player is interchangeable and basically just a number on a spreadsheet. We’ll get to the point where we’re bringing more saleable players though, I’m sure.

I was too far away to hear the conversation about the penalty, assumed people were fighting over taking it Not that I’m saying I would’ve scored.

Our best players are a different type and different level to Brighton’s. Theirs are fairly unknown players signed based on a well established data analysis team that has probably been monitoring all of world football for years. Generally they didn’t cost them much so selling for a profit is fairly easy. Ours are well known players who either more successful clubs didn’t gamble on or they were having a slight career dip. We paid fairly high fees and selling them for a profit means finding a very rich buyer and also massively weakening our team.

Well we have that, that’s why we signed Osula. Howe just doesn’t throw people in as often or as quickly as fans would.

What signing do you mean? Isak is our first team striker and we were never going to change that.

He is mainly a CB to be fair.

We saw how the midfield is supposed to work when Tonali and Bruno combined to put Isak through on goal. Hopefully they will be able to do that regularly enough and Isak will finish his chances. FWIW I thought the first half yesterday was a complete overhaul of how we’ve been playing. Joelinton and Hall were combining with Gordon down the left to great effect. We were trying to do the same on the right but sadly we had Murphy and he messed up a lot of moments. I really don’t think the criticism of Howe for not trying things is fair. He hasn’t changed his formation or whatever, but he’s clearly working on the patterns of play.

Do we realistically think we could’ve brought in a proven third striker though, with places one and two already being taken? You’d be back looking at a real veteran or something I guess. Unless maybe you could promise them you’d sell Wilson this summer, but even then they’d only move up from 3 to 2. Sadly Wilson played really well during the time he was likely to be sold and convinced us that he was an asset. Now it’s a very difficult problem to solve.