Jackie Broon

Yeah, the supporters will be shitting themselves, but this Arsenal team will steamroller us at the moment.

Early in the season he looked so good dropping deep into a 10 area and building play with quick feet and passing, but then there was no one getting ahead of him centrally to make the most of it. I think the intention of playing him in midfield was probably for him to play as more of a 10, but it seems like wherever he plays he drops deeper than he should ideally be, or maybe Eddie's system just didn't allow him the freedom to play like that.

Also reminds me of Gary Speed in his first season. There have been flashes of a good player in there, he looked to be finding his feet in the matches before his sending off but that seemed to set him back. Hard to judge at the moment in a team completely lacking in confidence and form.

What concerns me is that the same issues have been present all season and, more than the players, he has gone stale. It seems he can't motivate his players like he previously could, we're tactically stale and you could set your watch by his substitutions. There's absolutely no indication that a squad refresh would resolve tge issues we have.

I can't believe he's played that many actually, feels like he's had much less time on the pitch than that.

What's that saying? The definition of intensity is...

But this is Howe's team, he's had more influence over who we sign than most managers in the league.

Our issue is we often invite pressure by passing sideways rather than risk losing the ball by taking a risk to pass forward or take on a player, but we just then end up losing the ball in a more dangerous position for us. Keeping possession is fine when you have the players that will reliably keep the ball and will eventually find the killer pass. For a team like us, we just end up working opportunities for the opposition rather than ourselves most of the time.

They must have already, surely!

They can, because they can generally only be done May-August. But in that season the surveys themselves shouldn't add much time and the Natural England license process would usually be post planning permission. I've never in my career had a case where a development has been completely prevented by bats, but its astonishing how many are delayed by developers throwing in applications either without having read surveys that say emergence surveys are needed, or hoping the planners jusr don't notice, and then by that time it's September and they can't get them done until the bats wake up in May.

And quite obviously sulked for most of last season over the Liverpool situation.

Villa have done a pretty good job of moving on and up, Liverpool too over the years... Brentford, Brighton, Crystal Palace...

It does also seem be down to him not really trying that hard when he's not in the shop window, to some extent.

Nailed on that Liverpool sign him as a replacement for Salah and right wing is suddenly his favourite position.

Also £106.5m in September, and £172m in June.

Their investment, with RB, currently stands at just over £1bn, not £800m. The club hasn't be valued at over £1bn, that report was based on a probably inflated price that PIF paid Staveley for her shares. It has been valued by Forbes in their most recent publication last year at $1.1bn (£0.8bn).

Ultimately, I think he is probably in a position now where at the end of the season he will have to convince our owners that he has a plan to turn things back around, I think he'll have to sell that plan like he did his plan to keep us up when he was appointed. He doesn't look like he has that in him. People talk about our players giving up, but he looks like that more than anyone on the sidelines and it seems like he has no idea how to fix things, because he's said as much.

And I'm pretty sure hhere was a Bournemouth supporter who came on and prophetically laid out pretty much the exact trajectory and issues we've seen.

I wish there were an 'I regrettably agree with' rather than a 'like' button.

I don't want Howe's tenure to end this way, I love the man, I have massive respect for him as a person and for what he has done for us, I hate seeing him failing in this way. But he is failing. Whether we like it or not, our CEO has made it implicitly pretty clear he needs to have a strong finish to the season to keep his job. I just can't see where that comes from now.

So, who should we replace PIF with then?

And Eddie's only explanation is now that "it must be psychological", when he's doing stuff like making a single like-for-like substitution of Barnes for Gordon in response to them making a triple change and the match clearly turning against us.

The CEO situation was a very unfortunate circumstance with Eales illness, but it's difficult to see what direct influence that would have over the footballing side of the club in the short term. The DOF walking seems likely to have been a power battle over transfer policy, which Eddie won.

They have backed Howe to the hilt, allowing him pretty much full control over transfers, and put £327m into the Club's accounts since June.