Mattoon

Isaaaaak

All is forgiven

Should be at least 2 up by now

What a waste of a shirt Murph has been today

Major red top bias played out last night and we still claimed a draw, the foul on Gordon in the box, the blatant stonewall pen against Isak and the whistle in a promising counter attack. As blatant as it gets, yet we still came out on top, class.

What a fix, why is the ref blowing the whistle when we've got an overload in attack.

This will be more suited to us as a game and players will step up, I'm going for a plucky 1-2 or 0-1 defeat and probably another dodgy decision for one of the red tops or against us, or double whammy and both.

Shouldn't be scoring from there

Typical overreaction here I see, I'm glad I watched it away from the forum, we've not been half as bad as suggested on here. We've been the better side, just a lapse in concentration separates us. I think if we score early second half West Ham will fold, we've had a couple of chances I'd expect us to score so it just feels like a matter of time.

This is the issue we face, I agree its a small sample size but there was definite improvement. The Bruno/Tonali issue is something Howe needs to work out, because putting Tonali on the right negates a lot of his positives and dropping Longstaff, for all the abuse he gets from our fans, greatly affects our balance.

Just a few things I noticed from Wednesday night: We are 10x better in transition with Willock on the left. Kelly is better at CB than Dan Burn. Tonali is better as CM than out on the right and needs to be our maestro. Hall is ridiculously good and improving every game. Keep those changes and we stand a chance tomorrow.

I hope its a really controversial goal again and we beat them 1-0 for the tears and ultimately the schadenfreude.

Was a game of two tactics for us today, the first half harassing and hurrying their back line into mistake after mistake and we got the reward we deserved from our tenacity. Second half saw us shut up shop and ask Chelsea to come and make the tie interesting and it was a solid defensive display with a couple of opportunities to kill the tie off. Every player played their part and although there was a couple of lapses in concentration, no one deserved a berating today. Tonali was MOTM for me, he really made us tick.

Probably the best tie we could have hoped for, happy with that

Should have been 3

Tonali looks awesome in that "quarterback" position, really pulling the strings tonight.

Loving this press tonight, we're suffocating them at the back here

Willock 🤦‍♂️

Bwahahaha

Tonali close

Oi oi Isaaaak

Was probably one of, if not our best performance so far this season. We hassled and harried them from the off and they dug in deep and made it difficult for us. We made some decent chances and played some good football at times but ultimately some good defending, good goalkeeping and sloppy finishing killed the game for us. We could have and should have got something out of today, we deserved it on the balance of play, but really Gordon and Isak need to be putting those chances away.

This, plus we started from a much lower bar because of the Ashley era, so much dross left behind.

I don't think any supporter of sound mind wants us to do a "City" or "PSG" or even a "Chelsea". But neither do they want to see us tangled up in egregious red tape preventing organic growth. Where's the soul in buying the league? Invest wisely, build a strong, competitive squad and allow us to compete fairly, it shouldn't be too much to ask. We don't want to be selling off our promising youth to pay the piper or still have a vein of Ashley cast-offs running through the heart of the squad 3, 4 or 5 years down the line. Yes, there needs to be rules to stop hyper-capitalistic owners putting their clubs in danger, but the rules shouldn't create a divide between the haves and the have nots. No team should have more sway, more leeway, more margin for error than the others. You can't pull up the ladder on the other 14 and bury your head in the sand.

I celebrated that