Gallowgate Toon

He can play anywhere along the frontline and be a threat. Tremendously intelligent footballer.

Spurs have an absolutely horrific run-in, we might just catch them... Villa will get 4th imo.

Played some lovely passes today. He's definitely a good footballer.

Feels like anything and everything gets blamed in these circumstances. There's absolutely no way anybody at NUFC was thinking 'that bloody preseason tour!' in October, I'm sure.

Quite a few Feyenoord fans did appear to be absolutely slating him over the winter despite some decent output. However, it's Twitter, and some of our fans on there are the stupidest lot going.

Miley and Jo to return over the next couple of weeks? Feels like we'll try to keep Willock going until we get more back.

Barnes spent a good amount of years playing with Vardy so I don't think it's a surprise he's looking good foil for Isak. He'll know the importance of passes into space.

Clutch and a great lad to boot. Can't be arsed to worry about him leaving, he's a joy to watch every week.

He's very young and new to professional football. He'll have variability for a while yet imo. He felt a little hung out to dry by Willock and Gordon, for me, when they could see he was struggling. Anderson coming on was much better for him.

Howe said on NUFCTV that it wasn't pain but some discomfort. Hoping that's still true and it was more precautionary. Either way, this feels like a worrying injury for his career in how persistent it seems in such a good athlete. Not even sure how he picked this up while being out injured with a hammy?

Another very good showing imo. I really like what he brings to us (well, currently, at least). Gordon often feels a bit more playmaker-y to me on the left, he's thinking about moves and combos, creating angles to shoot. Barnes is more classic in that he drives to the space he sees first, whether inside or outside.

He did what needed to be done. Loved seeing him dish out a bollocking midway through the first half.

He really is helping Bruno to stamp some level of authority in midfield. I didn't think that was his natural game, maybe it isn't, but he's shown some good signs over his last cameos.

Big turnaround. Felt a bit like Brentford last season but Fulham missed bite in the final third. Gutted Flash didn't register another assist for, imo, a fair goal in a contact sport. I thought Willock looked weird all game. He left Hall very exposed on quite a few occasions (as did Gordon, tbf) and then had some brain-dead moments in possession too. Anderson is a battler and it's a big help at the minute when he's on, but he's showing quality on the ball too. Ultimately, that was a big week for us when down to the bare bones. Thankfully, some proper rest before another biggie.

So happy he's getting some redemption now.

He can easily be very effective on the right imo. Maybe not all the time but definitely for in-game switches or tactical tweaks at the very least. He's intelligent enough to be able to pick up inside pockets or go down the line and has 2 good feet.

Would love to see us go for it from the start. They've been leaky defensively and I feel we could really capitalise if we score early. Ideally, we'd see Gordon, Barnes, Anderson, and Willock from the start imo. I think he'll want to be extra careful with Barnes having done a full 90 so likely Gordon/Murphy. Similar with Anderson doing decent minutes, so probably Willock/Longstaff anchored by Bruno.

Any chance of an emergency deal has hopefully been wiped out now.

He was class, like.

Aye, 2 very high quality bits of play from him tonight. Easy to forget he's still working his way back to full fitness as well.

Had multiple chances to put that to bed and didn't. Had the feeling of our December games where we knew we'd have to manage legs during the second half. Fucking Paul.

Thick.

We should definitely only view Howe's tactical ability from the last few months while in exceptional circumstances, certainly not the 2 years prior. There are some fantastic videos out there about his systems and tweaks with us while managing some canny limited players. A fairly massive part of tactics is having the right combination of personnel to fit, you can't force things that aren't there or consistently magic up some grand tactical wizardry to make up for big personnel deficits. Seems to me like he's felt he's had to just go with acceptable risks while he's not had loads to work with while trying to work towards our next evolution as a club. Saying things like 'we should just drop deeper' forget that doing that creates impacts elsewhere and isn't just some silver bullet. Also, Howe seems to want to win and entertain. I personally love that as a platform far more than most of the alternatives in modern football.

City-Arsenal is just cancelling out from two control freaks. Klopp is a bellend but his MO is always to attack which led to some pretty excellent encounters.