AyeDubbleYoo

Nobody’s climbing away.

Not sure the Luiz sale has helped Villa mind, although it has for PSR of course. I think the problem is that players can't just be sold, they need to be replaced. So I can see a situation where you sell someone who would have had a good few years with you and need to spend again to replace them. In the meantime you finish the same position in the league anyway. No easy solutions but I get the point that, ideally, we would be able to identify players who are over performing or aren't essential to our plan or can be replaced more easily.

For Wilson and Miggy this was definitely the case. The principle is sound but it’s very close to ‘sell your best players’ so it’s hard to be too critical when we don’t do it.

Man, we've been through this so many times. We needed a whole new first team, would we expect there to be no issues left? If we'd signed a RW first we would just be complaining about a gap somewhere else. No merit in that argument at all?

Does nobody think that Gordon should play LW? I honestly don't know what the best setup is at the moment, but it's where he's played best.

If you can’t trust Kurt Leyland, who can you trust?

Bad thing is we’re not consistently playing well, good thing is neither is anyone else.

Tend to agree in hindsight but at the time I thought we didn't need Joelinton's defending out wide and he wasn't offering anything going forward. TBH I just expected Barnes to come on and us to score a couple of goals fairly easily.

I was going to say, it's quite rare to win 3 in a row.

Agreed, we didn’t have a fully developed football staff anyway, for obvious reasons. I’m not saying we can’t improve, I just don’t go so far in saying Howe made loads of mistakes.

We are challenging top 6 TBF, in fact we're challenging for 3rd.

Ah right, I see. Not sure there's enough of them to affect the atmosphere mind, but it is annoying.

PS Great to have this debate again

If all your players are injured it might be slightly difficult to give everyone the week off. Unless we just started skipping matches or something.

How are content creators part of the problem?

Wanting to maximise performance and make improvements doesn't mean Eddie Howe drove our players into early graves by asking them to run.

I hate to think how people felt when we were actually bad.

I thought it was pretty clear I was exaggerating. It's not literally impossible.

His job is to talk absolute nonsense to get engagement. It's all bullshit.

Last season? Incredibly difficult PL start and the hardest CL group in living memory? We still nearly qualified for the next round if we hadn't been robbed by a ref. And we still finished in a league position that means Europe 90% of the time. People love to ask tough question where the answer is bloody obvious

Did they start supporting us when we were the best team in the league?

Well we know the reason - injury crisis and impossible fixture list.

Guess the point of Man City is that you don't need CBs who are individually the best players in the league. The team as a whole is such a machine that the defence is very well protected. Of course, once the midfield isn't working and the machine starts creaking it's a different story.

No reason at all we shouldn't be winning this. Hopefully we have a good first half and actually finish a couple of chances.

Gabby can barely analyse which door lets him out of his house.