Stottie

What a waste. I guess Spurs would have stepped it up and beaten us 11 vs. 11, but we (he) gave them no need to. It could have been 9 vs. 11 due to his underperforming radgie mate as well. If Rafa had had subs in the bank, I think he'd have been hooked straight away. The rest of them mostly did okay with what was asked of them. Atsu played well. Hope the injured lads are all right. But what a waste. Of all that preparation, all that energy invested in the match, and of course the potential points we might have had. All gone in a mad moment.

Should have been on 25 minutes ago. That would leave him out of subs with 40 mins to go.

Shelvey - what a prick. We were in the ferking game!

I think we need more Rafa flags.

I'm a fan of expected goals but it's value depends on the nature of the game. Like other stats, it does not show game state, and many teams will not bother getting the ball forward and creating chances when already ahead. An expected goals of "0.1" is fine if you score early on with that chance and defend well enough for the remainder of the game. It doesn't mean that the other team defended well either to give up just "0.1". In other situations though, it can be useful. If you remember the Bayern vs. Atleti CL semi, Bayern absolutely hammered them but simply didn't score. It was not a "defensive masterclass" or any of the other Atleti cliches available to pundits. Pep got a lot of flak from them for losing the tie and not winning the CL at Bayern, but the manager can only set the team up to open up the opposition. It's then on the players and the run of the ball. Another advantage of xG is that it lets you know which strikers are on a simple hot streak where everything goes in and which ones are likely to continue scoring, i.e., by taking many shots from good positions, like Vardy during that scoring run of his. The latest candidate for "he's just on a hot streak" is Josh King. xG in the days of Pardew would have strongly suggested that our fifth place was a fluke and was unlikely to be repeat the following season. Of course, good pundits would have noticed this without stats, but we don't get good pundits these days, we get media-friendly bland ones chosen because they say nothing controversial, especially nothing non-PC, and look good in open shirts. You would never get one that looks like Jimmy Hill or Brian Moore. I've got much more faith in xG than the shallow knee-jerk punditry on MOTD.

Carra struggling to calm down calm down there at HT.

Yeah, I'm sure you're right. There's nothing stopping someone in the studio from giving a counter view though.

Yeah, it's feeling like the beginning of the end. The club can only try his patience for so long. The project he talks of is as a builder, not as a fire fighter.

Ashley is a cunt but so is the interviewer letting him off with the straw man comparison to Man City. Any journalist who gave a toss would press Ashley why we are spending less than Bournemouth or Huddersfield. Why we have the lowest net spend of any club with tens of thousands of match going fans. Ashley only gets away with it (from a national perspective) because the established media narrative is that we are deluded (read: thick) Geordies who don't know their place. See the comments from Jenas too, someone who has a job on MOTD because his face and general image fit, not because of his insight into or fantastic career in football. According to pundits, there is a parallel universe where a club with top ten revenue and fans who turn up in spite of repeated disappointment carries a millstone of overexpections. Our failure to win silverware for decades is mocked, yet conveniently forgotten when discussing the fans and their loyalty. We are supposed to pity the poor billionaire instead.

Remember when he was supposedly notoriously secretive and never said anything in public? For someone supposed to be "good mates" with the people at Tottenham, he has learnt ferk all about running a football club from them.

Those comments aren't far off a Ratner tbh. The team has no money or ambition so just sit in your little seat and don't expect too much. That's not what following a football team is about. Huge amounts of money in the game did not stop Leicester winning the title a year ago. As a Championship team, we were a Selz error, or penalties if you prefer, from the league cup semis last season. In Rafa we have hit the jackpot and it is almost criminal to cripple him for the sake of saving a few bob.

Lee Ryder back in with the gloom after missing another one with Kenedy.

He actually looks pretty good on that "football scout" video on YT. Quick and tricky, yet big enough to ease opponents off the ball. WhoScored has him down as 6 foot and 77kg, so a bit of a unit as wide players go.

If Rafa has seen something, get him in. Brazil included, it looks like he's only played 18 games' worth of minutes in league games. He won't be the finished article and Chelsea must have bought him having seen very little.

Interest in overseas broadcasts of the PL will always be limited by time differences. With the Internet, people now want to see and know everything live as it happens, and only a certain number will go out of their way to stay up late or tune in in the morning. City, Chelsea, PSG, and Barca for a while are/were bankrolled by fossil fuel money, and that may be on the wane too. It's quite possible that football is indeed in a bubble.

I think I heard him say that on one of the podcasts. Whoever it was I heard said that the domestic deal wouldn't significantly increase, which suggests the big boost in tv money is partly based on speculation over overseas interest in the PL. I reckon this makes it more likely that the big increases in tv money are unsustainable.

I don't know if that is "new info" but the "to Fenerbahce" rumour from NUFC 360 yesterday looks like it was them putting the wind up everyone by rehashing old info. The impression I get is that Perez wants to go to Spain but Deportivo aren't in any hurry to pay Arsenal's price. I've only see that tweet with the stats and another of him leathering one in during training, but that's good enough for me!

What's happened so far this summer has been far from ideal, but is not the disaster some are hyping it to be. Benitez is a football nerd with a system that stands way above any individual players, exceptional talents aside. So I doubt he's that bothered about Tammy Abraham or Caballero, because he'll know a number of other players who could do a similar job or how to tweak the system to work with the other targets' talents. If the window closes with no new striker in and no new keeper, that will be a problem, but there are three weeks of brinksmanship to come and we'll just have to wait and see. The window should shut before the season starts, but it doesn't, so we end up with this situation where only certain teams get their new signings in early and give them a preseason. A club far more cashed up than us is going to buy Barkley and another Van Dijk, but those players are yet to move. I think the money for Sigurdsson is crazy, but if his job is to put a free kick on someone's head or in the top corner, he'll be more likely to come in cold and do that than Van Dijk is to excel straight away in a new partnership or defensive three in competitive matches.

They've spent a s*** ton of money to little avail in recent years. They did under Rodgers. Klopp's net spent is £25m including this season. For a CL team, that's not much. 30M in for Allen and Ibe helps the net figure, but yeah, he's not spent much.

I don't do twitter, but when I searched the club name, some people on it seem to think Fenerbahce are about to sign Soldado.

I nearly got in with facebook but the email account it uses has already been registered with a password I can't remember, and more trips to error 502 when I go to reset it.

When Bellamy signed, I remember Coventry fans coming on the old forum with a photoshop of Bellamy as a Barbie Ken doll with a tagline of "He gets in the box! He falls over!" or something similar. I don't know how representative they were, but they seemed well glad to see the back of him.

Some keeper stats here. No save percentage, but you can calculate it from shots on goal and goals conceded. It looks like Adrian had some dropoff from his previous high level in the past season, but still saved a higher percentage than Randolph, so Bilic must have gone off him for some reason. Even if it was high profile howlers, Randolph didn't do better on average in the same team. In 14/15 Adrian conceded two more goals than Rob Eliot, despite facing 44 more shots on target, nearly 50% more. Even allowing for differences in shot quality, that's a huge difference. Some people praised Eliot for not being as bad as expected that season, but I reckon a better keeper would have kept us up. http://www.foxsports.com/soccer/stats?competition=1&season=20150&category=GOALKEEPING&pos=Goalie&team=0&isOpp=0&sort=6&sortOrder=1

Transfermarkt shows him having 50 games of playing time in Serie A over two seasons, the first with his club (featuring Dybala) comfortably mid-table. You would think the typical player from there would get playing time in the Championship. Benitez will remember him because he scored a 40-yarder against Napoli in 14/15. The shot was hit centrally though and the keeper comically lost the bounce.

If we don't have the cash now, we could of course just buy players on installments like many other clubs. You don't have to buy absolutely everyone with cash up front. fwiw, if Haidara on 22k a week is typical of the deadwood, 6M a year from Spurs would cover five of them's wages. Or quite possibly the percentage of all of the deadwood wages we'd have to cover to get someone else to take them off us.