Kimbo

Even in his own position, Fernandinho and Gilberto Silva were clearly better. Than Casemiro I mean.

It’s a bit of both. Our system doesn’t exactly encourage creativity through the middle or ball retention, we always want to play it out side. On the other hand Joelinton is looking like he’s on the downside physically, Willock has been poor for a couple of years, and the Ramsay signing doesn’t make much sense. We definitely need at least one midfielder IMO, and they need to have the potential to be Tonali level.

Our midfield looks a wreck. Willock is likely on the way out, Willock 2 might have been a mistake, Joelinton looks past it. Miley should certainly be starting more though IMO. It needs a rebuild.

Maybe we need a substitutions coach.

He’s not what we needed but as we’ve spent £40m on him and Joelinton is playing terribly, I’d give him a run in the team. It always seemed odd that we decided we needed more Joe Willock in the summer.

We’re told that Hall is fit. If he’s not fit enough to start games then hopefully he will be at some point soon, because this is a game losing weakness.

Most of us knew this would happen when he started playing at LB again. Him playing there should be a desperate last resort, not something you stick with when you don’t have to.

I think he needs to seriously reassess some things. - training methods, we need to be much better in possession - his favoured first XI has obvious weaknesses - transfer policy, overall our summer business has been an expensive fail

Howe is responsible for that.

We were poor before the CL games started tbf.

Hall has to be still be injured in some way.

Premier league teams can match us physically, when then happens we’re in trouble.

We may as well be playing John Ruddy at left back.

I think that was a pen.

That wasn’t even a flat delivery, it should’ve been dealt with easily.

Watching this feels like crawling through mud.

Brentford pressing us and we can’t handle it. It’s such an obvious weakness.

Agree with this. Pretty much everyone struggles against a low block, and I don’t really think a lot of teams play like that against us anyway. West Ham gave us problems with pressing, not a low block. When we’re pressed we can’t pass through the lines, we try to rush it forward and lose it repeatedly. Right now every team is athletic, we can’t just outmuscle and outrun them, and they know what our weakness is.

I would’ve been happier if he complained about lack of technical ability instead of lack of physicality and energy. If the ambition is to be a top team then we have to be better at keeping the ball.

They pressed us and we couldn’t handle it, every time we got the ball we would lose it quickly, so we ended up not having a choice but to get behind the ball. Same problem we’ve had for the last couple of years.

I’m not sure if we do sit back on purpose, I think it’s a result of us not being able to handle a press, which is due to our lack of technical ability and possibly a lack of emphasis on it in training and in the market. We get the ball, get pressed, try to rush it forward, lose it. The pattern has been there for a long time.

Teams know how to play against us and our summer refresh wasn’t good enough. As has been said, £100m on Elanga and Ramsey looks horrific.

We’ve been pretty poor almost all season.

Probably a fair scoreline, we’ve been shite.

Lovely stuff.