Stottie

The highlights made it look all Barnsley with us scoring a couple of goals against the run of play !! Yeah, that's the impression I got. I then looked at WhoScored who say it was 17-8 shots in our favour, 6-2 for shots on target.

Regarding Shelvey and his fitness, back when he was with Swansea, he copped a lot of flak for putting up an ad for a cook for him and his family on tasty wages. The press reported it as another sign of footballers being hopeless and over-privileged, but as a fan, I think you'd want the players in your team eating properly. If they are prepared to use their own money to do it, well good on them. It's much better than them being on the lash or eating pizzas because they can't cook. Lots of people of higher class social backgrounds on less money than a professional footballer use cooks, cleaners, nannies, personal assistants etc. without anyone accusing them of being hopeless, so it was probably just barely veiled snobbery.

I wasn't expecting the worst when we got McClaren. I thought individual errors doomed him in that Wally with the Brolly game, and Derby were unlucky to lose the playoff final in his first season there. My main concern was that their promotion push in his second season was doomed by their defence going AWOL. We were shite all round, but defence was still our biggest problem under Carver and the most logical place to start to put things right. From what he did with us though, all the naysayers about McClaren were proved right. I thought we might have turned a corner as late as the West Ham game, but he changed the formation and it was back to dross the following week.

Good goals. Relatively calm celebrations too, considering what he does to his team-mates when they score for us!

Yes, our situation looks more sustainable than Huddersfield who've won 8 out of 11 despite only scoring 14 in those 11. Whoscored says they are third bottom in the league on shots taken per game. Teams generally don't go an entire season winning 2-1 (five times for them so far) or 1-0 (twice).

Brilliant break stopped by top drawer save.

Pretty poor for half an hour, but the game opened up after that and I felt like we'd score because we have the better players. Great goal from Atsu, who's done very well. Gouff unlucky too with his earlier on. We could do with another, just in case.

How many times has Wijnaldum touched the ball? Or even sprinted in the general direction of it?

So Allardyce is getting a 1M payoff? Presumably to protect the glass house that is the FA. Inept to the end. :dowiespin:

As mentioned, Souness might be a good shout for that list. That Boumsong deal was as suspicious as they come.

Ha ha, just desserts for fatso. I hope he's ruined. As for his media mates, the idiot pundits defending him, nice try but the public isn't that stupid. The biggest salary in international football (!), 3M a year (!!) for the cushiest job going, and he still can't wait for his first game before cashing in more from anyone with a wad. Twenty minutes in with perfect strangers and he's telling them to circumvent FA rules. What a clown. Can't wait to see what the Telegraph has on the others. This is long overdue.

ITV reporting that MPs are saying he should be sacked. http://www.itv.com/news/update/2016-09-27/mps-allardyce-must-go-if-claims-are-true/ I think it's ludicrous for the people defending him to call this a "non-footballing" matter. Buying player A by circumventing the rules is a footballing matter.

Laughing my tits off at this. He should have been sacked for the "who am I to tell Wayne Rooney where to play?" comment, but this way, it'll be misconduct and he won't get a payoff (his contract can't be that juicy?).

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.