Smal

Honestly I thought we were good until the substitutions. They never looked like scoring against us and we had them pinned in their own 1/3, without us really creating good chances or being particularly good with the ball. The subs were calamitous though.

Absolutely raging, man. Was almost in tears when their second went in it’s my birthday ffs

I really, really can’t get my head around the Tonali/Longstaff sub at all, like. Can’t get over it. Longstaff is a good player out of possession but he’s not someone who helps control a game. The complete opposite of what was required. It didn’t even look like Howe was going to bring him on and then he changed his mind last minute.

The losing sub was Tonali for Longstaff.

Tonali off was a mistake

BDB been fantastic today

ah man, that has to be a goal man

Tonali is like twice as quick as I expected

Botman looks to have come on another level this season already

Foden should leave Man City. Absolutely mad he’s not been picked after destroying us last week.

Just got an assist for Adam Armstrong

was in response to this:

been deleted so:

bit of an overreaction tbh

makes it sound like you’re having a go at Hall and Livramento for not being here when we were shit

It’s not really his game, is it. Easy to forget he was a forward for most of his career. I think normally in that scenario we’d have Botman following Foden into midfield like we have done previously with our CBs (and did against Villa), but we’d clearly put Botman on a man marking job for Haaland, which he did a phenomenal job of tbf. When Burn marked Foden it meant Walker was free as I don’t think Gordo was doing a particularly great job of tracking him. They just have too many dangerous players to deal with tbh

Joelinton seemed like he got told to mark Foden quite early on which meant we lost everything he brings to the game. He couldn’t press high and he couldn’t make those deep runs beyond Isak that we absolutely needed.

Bruno had his best ever game for us in terms of pass completion - 62/66 passes at 94%. His season average last year was 83% and the best he managed previously in a single game was 90.9% against Leicester. He was also dispossessed by a tackle 0 times. This went with the eye test for me too, because as I said at the time in his thread I thought he was much improved in the game against City.

I'm pretty encouraged by a lot of the performance in hindsight tbh. We never really gave ourselves a chance of winning the game, but if we defend like that in away games in European knockout fixtures it bodes extremely well and it gives us a chance of beating anybody at SJP. They are the best side in the world by a distance imo, but ultimately they never had a clear cut chance. Their goal was a very low percentage effort that might've been saved or off target on another day. Defend like that against any other European side and we likely get a clean sheet.

fuck off pal

weird thing is our passing accuracy was 86%. Way higher than our average last season (78%) and joint with our best game from last season vs Leicester.

been tragic since moving Bright up front tbh

There better be about 20 minutes added on here

He can play CM for us but it definitely has to be the most advanced role. I don’t think you want him picking it up in our own half because he’s a risk taker in possession. One thing I love, and I noticed it in pre-season too, is that he’s not afraid of shouting at the senior players and telling them when/where to press. He clearly understands that part of the game very well.