ponsaelius

Day 16 and still no progress in the window.

I'd be absolutely stunned if they sold him tbf, especially with Zaha in Africa. Non-starter of a rumour.

Fuck him. Cunt.

Incredible what he did for Watford. Surely a statue will be in the pipeline.

Yorkie gunning for Crumpy's crown.

Delph would be a cracking player at this level. His relative ability to go forward with the ball would be a huge plus to our midfield for a start. He'll get a prem move though.

He's had a very strange career in that he had an exciting season at Parma, and Inter signed him the same year they bought Icardi for a similar fee and similar hype. Then he bombed at Inter, was loaned out to Livorno and bombed there, and then went back to Parma and did nowt. 1 goal in about 50 games across 3 years. Now after a year in the UAE and 6 months in Belgium suddenly he's being bought for £10 million+

Clement would have worked with him at PSG.

Clearly wrong on that front.

Gouffran is our current starting left winger and we need to go up. Ince would be a good signing.

He's clearly a very, very good Championship player at the least.

McCarthy would be a fantastic signing from our current position.

Pretty disappointing to have no players in heading towards Brentford. Poor effort from the club.

Hmmm. It's hard. The format does suck. 16 and 32 work very well, everything else is difficult.

Just seen the potential format. Personally I think that's better than alternatives that have 3rd place teams going through. Something approaching straight knockout from the start is good.

Many were against expanding the World Cup previously. Havelange basically got in in 74 because the stuffy bigwigs wanted to keep it as a European and South American event. But it made sense in the 70s with the mass decolonization that had taken place in the previous decades and did again in the 1990s after the fall of USSR and Yugoslavia. Football is the undisputed global game, and one of the reasons for its success is because its continually expanding and inclusionary. Compared to sports like cricket that seem happy to stay as the colonial boys club that Stanley Rous wanted football to be. So broadly on a principle I'm not against the expansion of tournaments. My reservations come for 3 reasons. One is that with the state FIFA is in right now, the motivations are far more in line with making money and using the 'democratic' nature of FIFA to retain power across many smaller confederations. This makes it very difficult for any decision that FIFA makes to sit easily. Secondly, the format is an issue. Expanding the Euros wasn't so much reducing quality that was the issue but the format that made it dull. Big teams stunk out the group stages just as much as the newcomers, because the format allowed and even encouraged negative football to flourish - look at Portugal getting through with 3 draws and then going on the win the tournament. So the solution is either to have groups of 3, or to have a preliminary round before the main group stage. I'd prefer the former as starting a World Cup in stages ruins it - it should always open with the hosts. Finally, an expanded World Cup of 48 teams is difficult to host. You can see with a 24 team Euros that nobody is willing to host it. Only a handful of large nations probably have the capacity to do so. However a 48 team World Cup does make co-hosting more workable, so even though that was never supposed to happen again it may need to.

The Gouffran problem is exacerbated when we go behind. When we need to come out of our system of play, play a bit more off the cuff and with more urgency he is simply incapable of doing so. Because he can't dribble or take on a player. Just a shocking footballer, in all honesty.

Agree with that, he slows down our play so much. It's just not acceptable in this division to essentially give up one of your wings. That's what it is at the moment. We don't have a winger on that side and we're supposed to be the best team in the league.

Gouffran is one of our biggest problems. We are absolutely desperate for somebody to come in and take his shirt off him.

We dominated the ball and the match. Of course we should, they're absolutely shite and our team was loaded across midfield. But we had no cutting edge going forward. This is what happens when you play two holding midfielders, have no width and only one striker up top. Rafa's a great coach on the training ground. He clearly absolutely drills the players in his ways to the nth degree. There is a clear pattern of play to our game, to the way we distribute the ball from the back, recycle possession and the way players move on the pitch. It's nothing remarkable but it is a monumental improvement on previous years and should be acknowledged. However - it also sometimes appears rigid, methodical and one paced. Particularly with the personnel playing today. For me, it shows a real blind spot and a significant degree of stubbornness on Rafa's part to not change things up over these last few games. Firstly by not doing so straight after Shelvey's injury. Then by playing the same team today as put in that performance against Sheff Wed, undoubtedly one of the worst displays at SJP in years. We lack an alternative way of playing, both from the start and mid-game or from substitutions. Once we went behind today there was no way we were getting back into that game.

Poor starting line-up, poor subs, dreadful result. Not much else you can say.

Ndong is better than Colback and both Januzaj/Borini are much better than Gouffran despite being shite.