Stottie

Cheers. Cool! Selfish reasons, but I'm in Japan and it's great to have televised early or 3pm games, especially before the clocks go back. 5:30 kick offs start at 1:30 or 2:30 am here.

From the "Sam Allardyce appointed as England Manager" thread. It was stating the obvious, so I'm not claiming foresight. I didn't know the "Succulent Chinese Meal" meme, so thanks lads. Absolutely creasing myself here.

Nearly a fifth of the season gone, second top in goals scored and fewest conceded, and easily best goal difference. That's having played three of the top four, which will be all of them after our next game. Best away form in the league too, which is much harder to get right than home form. We're not walking it as the hype was, but things still bode well. In the past tables above, Hull got automatic promotion in 2012 despite losing 15 games, virtually one in three.

And again. Three undefended corners!

Leicester even more statuesque than the first corner!

I've just remembered, but in one of those games they were 4-2 up against Everton and then managed to ship two goals. They lost to City 1-0 without troubling the keeper and the other was a defeat to that resurgent Wigan team who beat everybody playing 3-4-3.

Yes, they did, because it was right at the end of the season. The one the media never mention is that Man Utd under Ferguson (!) managed to lose the league from this position. Six to play, eight points up and two ahead on goal difference, the reason they were ultimately overtaken. http://s12.postimg.org/7bvsj33r1/league_2012.jpg City were struggling with massive expectations and repeatedly failing in the CL at the time, so it was a huge boost and no doubt relief to them to get the thing won. No win here and who knows what chain of events would have come about.

More about us at that time than the actual game, but a great take all the same! The one I don't like to hear is "twelve-point lead", because Man Utd had two games in hand and won them both.

Little Vurn off!

Don't want to say it too loud but I do too.

Gotcha! Thanks for the corrections. As for the other point, Rafa Benitez massively overachieved at Liverpool given the ownership of the club at that time. I don't see how that is even remotely debatable. He also got the best out of Steven Gerrard, a player with fantastic talent and great energy yet far from the greatest when it came to football intelligence.

It's clear alot of work has gone into set pieces, but at the same time it looks to me like much of it has simply been down to Ritchie (and now Shelvey) delivering decent-to-good balls into the right areas at the right time consistently. They're not whipping the ball in particularly well at pace, but just getting enough bend into the right areas (without floating it too much) to give our big lads a chance. Makes such a big difference when the rest of the team know that 7 or 8 times out of 10 they'll have a chance of attacking the ball, when previously our corner takers were hitting the ball terribly with no timing the vast majority of the time. In fact, we've gone for quite a long time since we last had players capable of putting e.g. decent corners in consistently (probably back to Nobby/Robert). Even Cabaye oddly enough was more "miss" than "hit" when it came to them. We've also now got the lads in the air for it. For a long time we had: Colo, Mbemba/Willo, Cisse, Haidara in the box. We can now choose from: Lascelles, Clark, Hanley, Dummett & Mitro We are simply much stronger in the air as well. Pardew evidently knows nothing about set-pieces. But Palace are a danger from them simply because they've got the right type of lads in the box. convinced palace lived off the tony pulis set piece coaching for a while under pardew. Sorry for the long quoting but interesting points for sure. While we definitely are better in the air now, a lot of our set piece goals haven't been headers from crosses. I suspect the total may even include breakdowns and second balls, like the Hayden goal and the Gayle header after the missed pen. Against Brighton, the two goals from set pieces were the Gouff volley and the opportunist "err, let's not play for the corner flag" cross and pull back to Yedlin. Both Gayle and Shelvey have scored from direct free kicks. So it's not just headers. But for a Sergio Ramos header from a corner in the dying minutes, Athleti won have won the CL, so they matter in the biggest games and for the best teams.

Amazing stat! On the subject of stats, the stats articles I've read suggest that set-pieces are generally underutilized and are easiest way to turn around an underperforming team. We obviously been scoring a lot of them recently, and have just shut out QPR who at kickoff had been the second or third most successful team from them. I wouldn't be surprised if this has been an early focus for Rafa, and that the team will score a higher percentage from open play in the coming months due to the longer time taken for any work there to bear fruit. One context in which I saw the "profit from set-pieces" idea was mentioned was a partial justification for Allardyce as England manager. Personally I think he is a joke and the epitome of the "proper footballing man" dullard mentality that blights English football, but his teams do have a historic record of doing well from set plays. I don't like it, but getting a bunch of players who don't play together that often to score from more corners is probably going to be a more achievable objective than getting them to be more incisive and open teams up. England are a "quarter-finals if we are lucky" level team, so the bar is not very high.

The Championship has the same goal-line technology as the Premiership I would assume. It doesn't have any, only currently in the prem. No goal-line technology in WC qualifiers either, which looks like it cost Japan a goal in a recent game.

I normally associate Moyes with decent defending but their CHs were statuesque in the highlights. Lukaku was in miles of space.

Potential Gouff vs. Perchinho battle down the left.

The goals from set pieces is a huge turnaround. As it happens, we are third in goals scored from the third least shots per game in the league, which to me suggests we have a better class of players than other teams. Normally few shots isn't a good sign, but we've spend a lot of time ahead and in control in games, so it's not a concern. Rafa is closing in on a 50% win percentage in league games. McClaren was 22%, Carver 15%.

Two away wins in a row, that's more like it! I only saw the first half but we looked in control and were knocking it about quite nicely. Fantastic hit for the goal. Good confidence booster for Yedlin at the end there. Best GD and joint fewest conceded in the league so far. This all bodes very well.

An unguarded net, but Zlatan knocks it in with aplomb, a bit like that forty yarder overhead kick against England. Otherwise a footballing lesson from City.

KDB wow!

Former Arsenal and England midfielder Stuart Robson goes way back in his criticism of Pardew. Maybe he had a word. The culture around Arsenal is to over-rate and over-protect their players from criticism, and probably Wenger too, so Wilshere will have a lot of people looking out for him.

On paper, very good. It sounds like a few of the lads who've come in can do a job in different positions, which could well be useful both for Plan Bs and for the 46 league games we'll play this season. For the first time in donkeys, we may even have a cup run. I hope we can put the days of Aarons and Sissoko at full back or Perez as a single striker behind us.

He may well do better in a better team, but like Wijnaldum, the suspicion is that our managers and other players were not the only limiting factors on what he achieved for us. He has good physical attributes and can rampage when the play gets stretched, but isn't going to be banging them in from outside the box like Yaya Toure, the league's ultimate rampager in recent years. There is a huge gulf in class between them. Sissoko 30m Wijnaldum 25m Janmaat 7m Townsend 11?m Add in the parachute payment and relegation may have cost us very little. Add on the luck we had in getting and keeping Benitez and this could be the smoothest relegation any team has ever had.

I think he might learn more from watching Roma's midfielders from the bench than from listening to Pardew.

I think the only reason Rafa is with us is the "fallen giant" romance of the project, not the owner or directors of the club. How many times in the history of football has a manager with lots of silverware taken on a job like ours? We should have been able to get a manager of his caliber by being a genuine giant. A team that is consistently at or near the CL places as we were under SBR. Instead we've been hapless and somehow still been rewarded with the lucky jackpot, not a choice between Brucey or Phil Brown or someone. If Rafa Benitez were not our manager, I think it would be ludicrous to speculate about any chance of success in the short to mid future.