The Prophet

You're not going to regularly qualify for the Champions League with 7th/8th highest wage bill in the league. Even Chelsea and Spurs haven't been regular qualifiers in recent year.

They might. If that's the case we'll be changing managers on a regular basis.

There isn’t a single thing on there that hasn't been reported by the local press or that couldn't be implied from their recent stoies. It's just absolute guesswork from one of the smoothest brains on Twitter.

Sam is a fucking idiot.

Nah.

We also bought and/or have regularly played Trippier, Thiaw, Schar, Botman, Hall, Bruno, Miley, Ramsey, Isak and Woltamade. Don't get me wrong, Howe loves his physicality and was one of the trailblazers of the man-to-man duel-fest that we see in the PL today. It's also fair to say he clearly likes players with more athletic attributes out wide. But to say we don't buy or regularly play "technical" players is absolute tosh. As ever, there's much more nuance to it than that.

Wish I had a pound everytime I saw the technical player myth.

Shame for him to miss Thursday.

He's one you being in for the new manager bounce, then send him packing before he inevitably gets found out

Just what's in the title.

Deserved everything he gets for the cold celebration.

Mbeumo wasn't it?

I don't think all of our signings have been failures Even if I did, there's more to it than scouting.

I'd agree and disagree, our initial targets looked decent. Trafford, Huijsen, Ramsey, Mbeumo and Delap look good on paper, albeit potentially unrealistic. Back ups previously bid for have included Guehi, El Khannouss and Pedro. Again, not bad. The issue is we moved onto a second choice stopgap in goal, a third CB, a second choice RW, along with sixth and seventh choice strikers (at which point it was panic stations). Elanga aside, who seemed pretty high up the list (and I kind of get why), last summer always struck me as a failure in execution more than anything else. I totally understand and agree the profile of players may have been too ambitious given the wages we can offer, but I wouldn't call it a scouting failure.

It is?

Probably a Forest win.

That's a bit of a mental team from Forest considering their league position.

Must say, delighted West Brom stayed up. Imagine going going down due to a payment made to your own charity? What the fuck are we doing man?

Oh yeah, there's undoubtedly a happy medium to be had.

I think it was Wenger that originally said it was the best approach, but Pep has also repeated as much of late. Makes sense though, players under less pressure tend to perform better. We've seen plenty of managers overdo it and fall flat.

Managers who treat the derby like any other game do tend to perform better in them though.

Aye, squad cost and wage bill are more accurate measures. Granted that has likely gone up after the summer. Gross spend tends to be used in bad faith, particularly as it ignores half of that summer spend was to replace Isak.

No decision is risk free.

Arsenal winning the league and Spurs staying up will round off a fucking awful season.

Overall, it's the right call. No doubt, it's been a clusterfuck of a season and Howe has to take partial responsibility for that. The lineup and performance yesterday was far from ideal, with similar trends haunting us all season. That said this is a geezer who's turned it around so many times before. He saved us from certain relegation, took us to the Champions League against the odds and of course won as s trophy. If anyone can come back from this season, its Howe. It's also nice to see some loyalty in football, but this summer's managerial market has echos of last summer's transfer market, with some huge clubs looking for a new Head Coach. PIF don't exactly move with speed so it could be a prolonged, bruising experience that's probably best avoided. These last few weeks have made me less confident he will turn it around, but he's certainly earned the right to try. Anyway the decision is made now, let's back him.