Away Toon

We should pick our best 11 players and stick with them and a defined shape unless they get injured. Best RB Yedlin, best LB Mbemba, best CB Lascelles and one other. We have three fairly good midfielders who need to play together Merino, Shelvey and Hayden. So unless Rafa pushes Merino into the Perez role means we should play 4-3-3. The front three don't have to be great defenders just close down space, Atsu, Gayle and Murphy. That's got to be better than whatever Rafas trying to do at the moment.

I was at 8 before we got crap and Rafa decided to continue picking shit players who are out of form.

I don't think anybody actually believes that Ritchie is a winger do they?

Ashley might be thinking if I do nothing he might get us relegated for a second time in a row and the value of the club will plummet again.

I went to work, came on here and there is another 20 pages of nothing. I hope it happens and it happens quickly, but all we really know is that Ashley is prepared to sell at the right price and PCP have made an offer. That's it. Hopefully after work tomorrow something definitive will have happened, not another thousand articles by journalists who haven't a clue what is happening.

Page after page of sheer conjecture. There is nothing in the public domain that gives us any indication of what the asking price is, what Ashley would accept, what PCP have offered, what they might offer, and anything to do with clauses. I expect that idiot journalists, imbecilic twatters on Twitter and morons with nothing better to do might prattle on about what they think might be going on, I thought most posters on here were above this shit. Apparently not.

Just say Yes

Resurrected

Compared to Ritchie's contribution on Saturday he was bloody amazing.

I think we knew where we were with most of our players before today, however we can now add in that Lejeune is really not very good and Murphy has promise but nothing more

The goals were due to the full backs, not the centre backs. Lejeune is definitely at fault on the second. He completely loses Smalling

I think we might have scored a little early. The siege is on. Maybe we can get them on the break.

Good solid start

Hope we are going to have a go and not just sit back until we concede.

It's pretty unbelievable that Rafa hasn't insisted on a major shakeup at all the various levels at NUFC. We seem to be terrible at every level, results wise at least, and nobody seems to be coming through into the first team. I don't think Rafa has ever really promoted young inexperienced players at any club, but I'm sure he would occasionally like the option of doing so. How Beardsley still has a job is beyond comprehension.

Not really We haven't played Man Utd, Man City, Chelsea or Arsenal yet, we've had a relatively easy set of fixtures, our point return from games is unlikely to get much better, we can't score and when we are put under lots of pressure we concede.

We are officially now in a relegation battle, we always were. Lost to Brighton, Huddersfield, Burnley and now Bournemouth who have absolutely muller end us for 45 minutes.

Just so lucky

I'd take a draw now, they are looking a lot more likely to nick it

Defoe coming on

Has Ritchie been substituted? He's disappeared anyhow.

We need to get Atsu into the game, he's by far our most dangerous player

Whoever thought this would be 4-4-2 was dreaming. Joselu is playing the Perez role.

I think that people suggest Ritchie as an answer to our number 10 problem because he's so obviously not a winger. I'm sure he couldn't be worse than Perez and we do have two other wingers who could replace him. Seems a no brainer to try something different but I'm not convinced that Rafa thinks we need to make a change yet. Lose a few more and that might change.

Well Mbemba is our best CB so paring somebody else with him for a start would improve us.