Gottlob

I suspect that Isak expected to be sold then thought that we were putting his move in jeopardy. Howe seems like the type of manager who wants unswerving commitment from his players and I'm not sure we were willing to pay the type of salary that Isak could command as one of the league's top strikers over the past couple of seasons. Wissa and Woltemade were understandable purchases given the circumstances. Wissa seemed like one of the closest things possible to an Isak replacement, someone who could stretch teams from the front and had scored plenty of goals the previous season from open play. Then after missing out on other targets and being confronted with rising fees, we turned to Woltemade as someone with a relatively high profile and plenty of upside. Neither had shown a wealth of quality at the highest level but theoretically they could have provided us with the right blend of skills. It hasn't worked though and ultimately the transfer team and the manager to some extent are going to be judged on the results rather than their initial concept. It's fair enough in my opinion to question Wissa's age, motivation and career trajectory or to wonder how we expected to get the best out of Woltemade. There always seems to have been a mishmash there between his qualities and our reliance on a more pacy and direct style of play. I also don't think that we've been particularly proactive or imaginative in the transfer market over the past couple of seasons, which leaves us needing plenty of work in the summer to come.

Cole is fifth in the list of all-time Premier League goalscorers and second when you take away penalties. He was never the main man at Manchester United, a side which changed substantially a couple of times while he was there, but despite a slow start he developed his all-round game and was pretty crucial to their major successes of the late nineties. He then continued to score at a decent rate well into his thirties playing for middling clubs. I think if anything his game and the changes he made to it are underrated. His partnerships with Beardsley and then Yorke remain highly regarded and are certainly some of the best I've seen. And I think we have had few players more talented. It's always difficult to compare between generations, but next to Isak his burst of pace and all-around movement made him more of a persistent threat.

The striker situation has surely been pivotal to our season and it was always going to be a hard market to navigate. At the start of last summer when we were still insisting that Isak was not for sale, I had not only resigned myself to but contented myself with the idea of bringing in Calvert-Lewin on the basis that he was at least experienced and would offer something a bit different and most importantly was out of contract, giving us the funds to improve the rest of the squad. I think though that the club knowing Isak's position probably went into the summer expecting to sell him at some point. And that we would have liked perhaps one from Joao Pedro or Ekitike and one from Delap or Wissa. In that case could we have acted quicker or offered some of those players more assurances in order to secure them ahead of other clubs? I think most people presume that especially in the absence of a director of football, Howe was quite central to our transfer process therefore any lapses or any perceived lack of competence reflects back on him. In the end he shares some of the responsibility for putting together a squad that hasn't quite thrived this season. I don't think any of those summer signings have been resounding successes at this point and while some should continue to grow into good squad players, the striker situation surely needs addressing again in the summer and we might have to take a loss in order to change things up and move players on.

Opponents have been finding that gap between the midfield and defence with regularity for three years now. We rarely seem to cause the same problem for other teams. I think the question is not whether it occurs but what benefits Howe thinks we accrue from sticking with our basic shape and the relatively flat midfield.

While I'd never rule out corruption I think there is certainly an aspect where referees are wowed by top players and top teams. Someone like Yamal or Raphinha gets the ball and any foul is treated as a cynical attempt to stop a promising attack. If one of our players gets the ball and the same foul is committed, well they've just been knocked over and it's part of the rough and tumble of the game. The same sort of thing occurs when it comes to time wasting, where a few seconds suddenly become a major crime whenever a top team is chasing the game. And if we as the unfancied side were down to Barcelona or the game was otherwise petering out, the referee might not have allowed those extra seconds last night.

He doesn't have silky skills or a real creative streak and sometimes seems to have a very high top speed while being slower off the mark, which is perhaps less about his acceleration than his confidence, positioning, anticipation and first touch. But unlike some of the wingers he has been kind of unfavourably compared to, he seems low on confidence and somewhat timid rather than headless. When you have those raw components and are willing to take instruction, a lot of that final ball can be about confidence and the readiness to strike first time. I thought he had a really good game last night.

Lots of costly mistakes now and I'm sometimes not sure about his positioning when the game is stretched and we are dropping deeper into our own area. He is the player we reportedly signed not the one that was celebrated as a resounding success after three or four matches: he has all the gifts and the right tools but he is too prone to lapses and errors.

Feel like despite our iffy form this little run has been one of his best for us in the midfield, not just a talisman who is using his physical qualities to good effect but someone who is showing real leadership and making good use of the ball.

Painful after all our hard running and good play and Olmo is obviously looking for it, but we were too frantic over those final few minutes and Thiaw has made far too many costly mistakes since early December.

Thought it was a classic case of a player being caught in two minds: should I shoot or should I round the keeper? Oh shit, I've just booted the ball out of play! Better save face by going down and see what comes of it. I'm not sure he was trying to buy the foul but I did think he went down unnecessarily and I wasn't surprised that he was carded for it.

Wonder how much better off we'd have been had we signed Calvert-Lewin and Adam Armstrong instead of Woltemade and Wissa?

A lot of the angst is tied to the nature of today's game, where there's a more fixed hierarchy and the bigger clubs sometimes seem to get further out of reach or at least keep stockpiling players and funds. We're in a bit of a purgatorial zone where lots of fans want and expect us to bridge the gap, but the worry is that we fall irrevocably behind after one bad season. The game doesn't really seem to reckon with patience unless you have the revenues to support it or limit your expectations. More broadly I think a lot of fans approach football today with real cynicism. We all put that aside but to different degrees when it comes to our support of the manager and players. I'm sometimes staggered at how upset some posters seem to get over criticism of Howe and the team, even where it descends into contempt or abuse in terms of derision and name-calling. Again I'd say there's a bit of a cycle where some of the more negative posters are scornful of Howe and the team, then receive scorn in response and of course we end up goading each other and fighting our corners.

Football is a form of release and whether I'm at the match or visiting an online forum I expect to see plenty of whingeing and moaning. I'd even say that I enjoy a good dose of criticism - a vehement put-down, an exasperated blowout or some gallows humour - more than I can empathise with those who seem to think that the purpose of football actually lies in supporting the team. It's the same when people moan about (or in tonight's case praise) the fans. Crowds are probably a bit quieter these days in general owing to the older and wealthier demographics of those who attend. But even in the Keegan days there was plenty of whingeing and impatience, we have always jeered a backwards pass when we're chasing the game, been loudest rarely in support of the team but instead in a show of outrage and defiance against an official, and when we're getting thumped (like we were tonight) some of that gallows humour and defiance comes out and the support is ironically better than ever. I will say that there are many people who are overly negative in my opinion especially when it comes to Howe, but my impression is that most of the insults and self-victimisation actually stems from the other side who respond to sometimes even mild criticism with cries of 'Here we go again!' or 'What is it with you people?' and frequently litter their responses with 'moron' and 'cunt' etc. Also some of the same posters who derided fans for attending the games in the Ashley era now seem to demand an incessant and sometimes absurd stream of positivity. We've gone from spending nothing and finishing say 12th in the Premier League to spending lots and being owned by the super rich while expecting to finish around 5th or 6th. It both is and isn't a big difference and expectations always shift very quickly.

He is 29 and has had one season of prolific top flight football. Overall I don't think his numbers are that great when you're looking to compete for Europe and are spending £55 million on someone to lead the line. But I also think that we were expecting to get him for a much lower price, that we might have bid for him even if we had managed to sign Joao Pedro or Ekitike, and that his stats last season were compelling. That striker market is a really difficult one and there aren't many great options out there, but right now it isn't working and might be serving as a cautionary tale at least when it comes to older attacking options who are reliant on their physical qualities.

I didn't expect anything other than an absolute tonking so thus far I'm happy with the result. But if we could manage twenty minutes of decent possession and maybe a couple of shots on goal, I'll be absolutely beaming and will be able to regale my children about one of our greatest ever performances at the Etihad Stadium.

If he can't say anything sensible, he probably shouldn't say anything at all.

It's worth drawing this out a little because (as you say) the suggestion is that our problem lay less in identifying targets and having a general plan of action, more in getting players 'over the line' and carrying that action plan out. That makes sense. By the time of Mitchell's departure we should have known what we were up to in the summer, but his absence presumably left us lacking that bit of nous, experience and flexibility in the market. So what went wrong and what might have turned out differently? Ahead of the summer there was a suggestion that we'd look to do our business early, potentially targeting the PSR window, while at the start of the summer we remained adamant that Isak wasn't for sale. In retrospect I think that by the time summer rolled around, we were expecting to sell Isak and focused on securing attacking replacements. Then we missed out on Joao Pedro, missed out on Ekitike in a way that seemed to upset Isak's camp (in so far as it made Liverpool a more challenging destination) and started to panic. Did we make a decision at some point to start moving ahead with our other targets, potentially above cost, or perhaps even decide to revert to old targets where some of the groundwork had already been done? It's all idle speculation but some of that would make sense to me. It would help to explain our summer, though right now the choices we made do not really seem to be paying off. For me Elanga, Ramsey and Wissa made sense for our system as it was and as it had worked, more or less, for the past few seasons, while Woltemade was a bit of a wild card, presumably a late option who we felt offered more upside given the cost. As it turns out we haven't really adapted to suit Woltemade (or vice versa) and the others have struggled to get up to speed. Instead of trying to double down on what worked in the past in those positions we might have been better, for instance, signing a holding midfielder and a more creative winger.

At least better than the last transfer window. No harm has been committed and nothing foul has been accrued therefore I can't give this window any less than a 5 out of 10. It won't help us beat Liverpool at Anfield, but we never manage that anyway so I don't know what in the hell you were given to expect?

He looks like a lanky fellow so surely no hurdle will stand in the way of us getting this done.

I don't know what our PSR situation is and while it seems broadly calculable we always seem to get widely conflicting reports. I presume that we headed into the last transfer window expecting to sell Isak and conducted our transfer business in response. The fact that we spend around £250 million on incoming transfers means that we have a pretty fully squad. Some of those signings haven't performed but for both footballing and financial reasons it makes sense to give those players time. We have a lot of money tied up in them and I wasn't expecting us to go big during this transfer window on say another striker or wide forward, but given our defensive ailments it surely made sense and was within our means to sign a backup left-back or maybe another midfielder. I guess that our lack of signings has absolutely nothing to do with us saving our funds for a new manager and much to do with Howe's conservative nature regarding squad balance, though I also think that our transfer team is pretty lacking and wouldn't necessarily have the capacity to move in a timely fashion even if we felt that we did need someone.

We'd have to play the away leg in another UEFA country, with the match according to UEFA coefficients and other rules and precedents most likely taking place at Bloomfield Stadium in Tel Aviv.

I'm not really the audience, but I do like that shirt. I also think that the sunglasses and silver chain should be requisites whenever we wear it.

I think the English sides should be quite dominant when it comes to European competition at the moment. Theirs is comfortably the richest league and has the largest contingent of wealthy clubs. But the current Champions League format is great for all of the big clubs, of which we are one in a 36-team league. You can pretty much cruise to a top-16 or at worst top-24 finish and make your season on the back of remaining in the Champions League until late February.

I really like him but his tendency to treat the ball like a hot potato has been there since the start. It doesn't seem like a technical issue and perhaps he benefited from playing with a certain pace and physicality in the Italian league, but he just needs to calm it down and pick his passes. I guess it is his good work off the ball as well as that pace and physicality which makes Howe want to try him as the deepest midfielder. Theoretically as well as helping us defensively he should make us more mobile and give us more options playing out from the back.

When he's on form he offers us an attacking spark that nobody else in the squad quite matches, whether it is his ability to play off the cuff, his willingness to attempt the odd difficult pass, the way he gets forward with the ball or like others have mentioned that ability to look a bit laboured and indecisive before dropping a shoulder and putting on a burst of pace. Even if it was a bit scrappy at times, we looked good with he and Elanga playing in an around Woltemade while Ramsey also added strong ball carrying from the midfield. Though even at 1-0 down we were afforded more space than we often get in the Premier League.