Stottie

Feel so sorry for the man. Deserves to be relaxing as we should have scored 5! Poor guy I can sense some gifs coming.

Poor man's Steven Gerrard my arse!

It's kind of ironic that we're selling him after he looked good against Arsenal, but they were off the pace and it was chucking it down. 8M is a lot for him. I hope it goes toward a striker.

That there is the worry.

Questionable buy to begin with. Not in form and made Ligue 1 worst 11 team last season. Once bought, not given proper go in poorly set up team with rookie striker and on the same side as a poor full back. A fine recipe for money down the drain. That said, he's not really applied himself enough to have much sympathy for him. If some money back means we can keep Sissoko and Perez, he's got to go.

I rate Shelvey and Saivet sounds okay, but this one smacks of panic button. Spend the money on Austin. Townsend's record on the left is poor, and I don't want to contemplate us playing him on the right because that probably means Sissoko being sold.

Joey Barton wasn't exactly Mr. Happy. Just a thought but maybe Shelvey's Swansea career went downhill because they resigned Sigurdsson. With Ki also in the team, that's a very unbalanced midfield. It sounds like the kind of square-peg, round-hole recruitment we do.

Saivet might get closer to Payet than we managed earlier in the season.

He's got 12 goals and 16 assists in 90 full games of playing time in the Premier league. Some involvement in a goal every three games, despite playing a deep role for the last 20 or so games' worth of minutes. Our entire team has only scored one in the last four games.

Don't know the first thing about him. The old vids on Youtube are of him up front and he looks way better at that than any of our current CMs. He's got a good leap on him and seems to like the ol' pass it in with the instep type shooting. Beardo was the master of that particular technique.

Colback is poor, but the least bad spell he had was under Carver when he would pop up in the other team's box and get the odd goal. It suggests McClaren is telling him something different. Anyway, if Mbabu and Janmaat play along with a more positive CM, that's three places for Tiote to get rid of it before he gets caught on the ball. Mbemba is also way more comfortable on the ball than Iron Mike was. I'd be more hopeful for Tiote (or Anita) as DM in this setup than Dummett LB and Colback as the other CM. Still need a goalscorer though.

I had a brief look at that Swansea forum and there were comments saying his decline in form came from Monk playing him in a DM-like role. Watch us do the same....

After seeing the highlights, I'm pleased I listened to their commentary, not our muppets. Another blank and another defeat, confirming the systematic problems we have. fwiw, the Watford commentary said our strikers had poor movement and weren't getting in the box. We have poor movement and poor service feeding back on each other.

There is legal online radio at their end on BBC Three Counties Radio.

As for Mitrovic, he gets into good situations and shows promise. He's raw though, and it's a big ask for him to mature quickly in a harder league.

Good post and the bold bit is an interesting point. It's only six years since we played in the Championship, but I thought there was a huge gulf at that time between the strikers in both leagues. Mistakes that would have cost goals in the Premiership didn't end up hurting us. Even Shola looked pretty good and scored goals. The mental one for me is that both Ba and Remy were proven in the Premiership when we got them. Of course, their situations meant they were available on the cheap, as we like them, but they had both shown enough in half a season to confirm their ability. So Austin comes along, is even more Premiership proven, and is holding all the cards in his contract situation vs. QPR. He is the real deal going cheap. So what do we do? Spend the pretty much the same money on a punt on a kid from a lesser league. Not only do we not learn from our failures, we do not learn from our successes.

Yeah, I think it's wrong to take the total shots number or shot on target number as indicative of us being outplayed the whole game. 9 of Everton's attempts were from outside the box. Inside the box, it was 11 attempts to them, 7 to us. Mitro's and Gini's probably the biggest chances. Mitro did well to pull off so he could attack it, but the header itself was awful. His headed effort in the first half was also a better chance than Waddle and whoever made out in the commentary. As ever, we're crying out for a CM. Like De Jong last week, our forwards are also not good enough when we do manage a clear opening.

3-0!

Man U managed only 11 attempts in a game where they were behind for 70 minutes. They used to manage that in the last five minutes and Fergie time.

Well said that man! :lol: Merry Christmas everyone!

Dunno if it was Hutton bad or tired or Thauvin good, but he beat him several times to the outside and swung in good crosses. On another day, Mitrovic will reach them.

SDJ has to hit the target from there. What a terrible header. I think a goal there would have killed the game. As for the other two, Gini should have had a shout from Thauvin and Ayoze's was behind him and he took it early like he does. They were both only half as good as the SDJ chance. That one Mitro missed into his feet just after coming on was also a decent chance. On the whole, we didn't create enough, given how poor they were/are. A point is all we deserved.

Sacking him is the obvious move given how they've been playing and the woeful points total, but it's still a bit of shock given his standing and long-term track record. Some pundit is probably going to try and reduce this to one or two little factors to make a nice, easy to understand story, but he's been effing up on multiple fronts. You can't just call Hazard's non-performances the canary in the coal mine, because half the team isn't performing. Oscar, Fabregas, Costa, even bloody Matic. The off-the-pitch stuff with the doctor etc. would be dismissed if the team were winning, but they aren't and you end up with the suspicion that he has indeed completely lost the plot. Without Willian's freekicks, they've hardly scored any goals this season. We would have beaten them but that Ramirez wondergoal. If whoever comes in gets them playing, they've got a title winning team, albeit too far behind to do anything this year. Their ageing defence looks like the biggest problem. Man City and the fee for David Luiz even show that you can buy big and still not get the finished article. Maybe a bit striker-lite, but I suppose Hazard or even Fabregas could still do a pretty good job with the right set-up.

If Leicester's rivals for top four are Liverpool and Tottenham, they rely heavily on Coutinho and Kane and are 11 and 9 points behind Leicester, respectively. Sturridge isn't a factor anymore. Chelsea have the players but they are too far behind and in turmoil. Leicester were lucky against Chelsea but it still looks like they've tightened up defensively compared to earlier in the season. It's unlikely they will continue with what is title winning form, but they're not far off the point where Europa league form and their headstart should still leave them ahead of Liverpool and Tottenham. Leicester would be wise to buy to consolidate their position, but it's hard to see Liverpool and Tottenham making a strong challenge without making big buys.

It sounds like they're giving Mignolet a new contract. I don't think he's a top four keeper. I was digging through some stats Mr. Logic style to see if its worth betting on Leicester or if they're just being flukey and apparently 42% of shots on target against Liverpool go in. Worst is Bournemouth at 45%, including that Ayoze toe poke that looked stoppable. Stoke are best at only 17%, followed by Cech and De Gea. It's 34% for us. Liverpool actually lead the league in fewest shots on target allowed, so the others must be doing their jobs. http://www.footstats.co.uk/index.cfm?task=league_shots_perc