Smal

aye, treat it as a very expensive development loan and move on. Value only going to go up too. Would start ahead of Joelinton now in lots of scenarios imo.

it should be us. Provides extra value because of the club home grown squad space.

extremely sus keeper

Anderson came on and 35 minutes later he has won the most duels (6) from either side across the whole game basically the ideal Eddie Howe midfielder

Stansfield plays like a guy who knows he's not good enough

been watching Quansah at the under 21 euros. Not good. Poor with the ball and not solid defensively either. Charlie Cresswell next to him has looked better. Seems he’s off to Como.

has looked like a Bruno regen in the opening two games. Has absolutely everything in his game.

Elliot Anderson is much better than any of the other midfielders or forwards. I just find it devastating watching him run games like he did in the opener. Fuck PSR man

think it must be Conor Coady? Getting absolutely mauled by Slovenia in the opening 10 here, can't get out of our own third. Think McAtee is a bit rubbish to be honest.

it’d probably take £80m+ for Kulusevski but he’d be my #1 choice if it were possible.

8 tbf

10 out of 20 were penalties, yeah. This season 5 of his 10 goals were penalties.

worst 4th official performance I've ever seen

right back with a left-footed player cutting in and not taking up his space ahead of him and we'll see the best of him imo.

kind of enjoying Joe Hart on co-comms. Pretty good.

the best and the worst of Tino in the space of about 2 minutes

all of the squad there actually play (apart from Morton who's been injured for 4 months) though unlike Miley. Really good for Tino there.

just completely let his man go for a great chance for Czechia too, really poor

Anderson looks a level above everyone else

MGW fucking up the best assist of all time ffs

it's kind of reassuring to see that Gordon is shit/sulky for England too

the Isco revival is great. Love that a player can still thrive purely on technical ability.

If we're spending £60m+ on him I'd be wanting more than 5 non-penalty goals, like. I dunno, I sound miserable but I really hope all these links are smokescreens because I don't like any of them

You can't always play direct though (and... we don't) because of how the opposition plays. Perhaps they sit deep and allow no space, or they play a high line with their keeper sweeping everything up so that you can't play in behind them, or their defenders are fast and able to deal with your attackers. The point I've tried to make is that Elanga doesn't really give us any of the added versatility that we need. If we want to keep progressing we can't just have a squad built for one game plan when there are games where that game plan identifiably doesn't work. Sure, but good technical/creative players can help with both. If Bournemouth or Fulham come to SJP to press us, and our usual plan of going direct isn't working, I think a player like a Lee Kang-In or a Kulusevski gives you a different way of being able to play through it to what we have in the squad. I don't think we are bad in possession considering how we play by any stretch, but there are definitely games where it's frustrating to watch our more technically limited players losing the ball because they can't play with their backs to goal and/or in small spaces. That's the kind of profile and versatility the squad needs imo.

against teams that press us, yeah we do struggle imo. In terms of build up, for passes completed outside of the opposition 3rd we rank 11th in the league with an 83.33% pass completion rate. For reference the top 4 teams are Man City (90.5%), Arsenal ( 86.95%), Liverpool (86.73%) and Chelsea (86.58%). It's definitely something we could do with improving on - the likes of Murphy, Gordon and Joelinton all frequently give the ball away pretty carelessly.