Pilko

Hope this is the end days of Pep we're seeing. Win the league and fuck off in a blaze of glory please.

I was hoping to see him wearing a long beige trench coat and a trilby hat.

I predict he goes there, has a good first season, gets bored of playing against German knacker sides that aren't on the telly and gets chased down the road by the oompah band before 2028 is out.

Feel like the staff have done the hard yards with him and we're just starting to see it bear fruit, would be a real shame to sell now. Of course he'll have his price and if there's silly money thrown at him it makes sense but I'd hate to see him go for anything other than a whopping fee.

Shame that, he's done brilliantly for them. Hope they make another good appointment and can make a fist of consolidation next year.

£45m for Joe Gomez Sometimes I wonder if our scouting team is just two blokes locked in a room with no internet connection trying to think of footballers they've seen, then writing their names on a piece of paper they slide under the door.

Can see a shitty draw. 1-1 with a late Ham goal

John Carver said that once and got absolutely ridiculed for it.

And for one last time - that's for the manager to figure out - in bold for the hard of thinking. And he hasn't, clearly. 1 clean sheet in 22 isn't just individual errors and bad luck, it's hard data that points to an inability to set a team up mentally, physically or organisationally from a defensive perspective. If you're going to say it's not his fault cos he's not on the pitch then fine, but it's where I tap out of this conversation as it just shows you'll not have Howe take blame for anything.

Said this other day but the obsession with Joelinton playing every minute hurts us more than it helps us. He's a massive part of why we can't hold onto the ball for toffee and why we invite so much pressure.

Got to hope Burnley can keep it to 2 or 3 goals max and then hope for The Miracle of Selhurst Park.

Hermansen with a Nick Pope quality kick there

Fucking cunts

Don't you fucking dare rule that out

Yeah I know, we've seen that in 21 out of the last 22 games but obviously it's not the managers fault for any of them in your eyes.

Do fuck off

That's what our manager is paid handsomely to figure out, not me. But we've been pissing away late goals since August regularly and he hasn't found an answer. I don't understand what you're interrogating here. The manager has spoken at length dozens of times about lack of training time and too many games at once being one of his biggest issues, which I can understand and to an extent accept. He's now had a three week gap for internationals followed by a week between each game, and yet the same problems with our play exist and don't look like getting any better. I don't know why me questioning what he's doing with that time he's cried out for is such a controversial thing to do. EDIT: And in the case of Forest and Palace, two sides who'd just played Thursday night themselves with plenty of players missing on the Sunday and we generated one point from six in those games, despite the time on the training pitch he cited as being a big factor.

I'd like to think a manager who's overseen 1 clean sheet in 22 games might see some value in posting a shutout on the road. Totally agree that more points pissed away puts an even more negative slant on the draw.

Perhaps we use the training time to practice defending better? A novel concept I'm sure.

Most of those sides probably have other facets to them, though. That's basically 95% of our gameplan.

Maybe, but I'm only quoting what he's been telling us every single week since about August. The problem was the lack of training time, so he said. We've had a good chunk of it now, we're still pissing away points, can't defend and incredibly patchy going forwards.

What you said was pure bollocks, there's loads of people who've cited themselves as "out" after a lot of wrangling and acceptance of the whopping great list of "mitigating circumstances" and factors outside of his control that are trotted out after the weekly shit show he serves up.

And the thing with the Howe Inners is, anything and everything that doesn't work out is anyone but Howe's fault.

Happy with that at HT. Plenty chance Arsenal up it but they could have been 2 up after 20 mins.