SteV

Don’t agree Gordon was playing within himself. But that’s a conversation that’s been done to death, so we’ll agree to disagree. IMO the only criteria for who takes the pens, is who is the most likely to score them. From all available evidence, that would appear to be Gordon. If he leaves, and Woltemade stays, is in the team, and deemed the best available pen taker, then absolutely he should take over.

We’ve got one of the best pen takers going. Why on earth would we choose not to have him taking them?

Not on particularly big money at Liverpool, so we could fairly easily offer him a raise well within our structure. Not that I think it’s a goer at all.

Can’t see him playing looking at the state of that.

Club captain Reece James having great craic on the bench.

If he’s out. You know the owner will be trying to pressure someone to say he’s OK so he can play on Thursday.

Surely we can’t be as poor as Chelsea have been!

Shaun Derry’s son starting for Chelsea

Forest pretty much chucking today’s game looking at the lineup:

Yes, it’s obviously completely unrealistic, but tbf to @Dokko I’m sure he wasn’t suggesting that it was, more just a hypothetical discussion point. I agree the first line of your post would probably be the position of the majority of the fanbase anyway.

He’d have to go on a monumental PR drive. Apologising for behaviour. Saying his head was turned and he made a terrible mistake. Even then, whilst it would probably make sense from a purely footballing perspective, the damage HE caused was so substantial, I don’t think it would ultimately be a good idea.

Although we’d all find it marvellous if it were Spurs to go, West Ham feels like a fairly solid consolation prize to me.

That we’ll pay a world record transfer fee? Given what’s been said about out predicted transfer business, the chances of us paying £75m+ for an established PL player, would seem remote at best, no?

It’s an interesting point. On the face of it, win the UEFA/Europa is a higher achievement than winning the league cup. But I think you can definitely argue it’s easier. We beat at least two teams that were significantly better than anything Villa will face in their run, and even if you factor in Forest, Chelsea and Brentford didn’t play their strongest 11’s, they were still probably better than most of the teams Villa will have faced.

Feels fairly wild that they’re actually playing tomorrow as well

Yeah, after the takeover, and probably started by Ashworth when he was here, we seemed to start targeting kids in the 14-16 age bracket (no Saville). The first one of them to seem like he might have chance of making the first team is Leo Shahar who nabbed from Wolves, who’s 19 now. Still tbc whether he’ll actually be good enough but hopefully there’s at least one or two who will eventually break through properly over the next 2-3 years.

Pun intended?

Lad called Matt Targett ripping it up at Boro. Other than that, no.

Correct decision IMO.

xESd (expected East Stand Deaths) = 7.3

The ball he played over the top for Barnes was absolutely sensational. Won’t make any of the highlights as Barnes took a shite first touch and it bounced away, but it was literally a 40-yard clip, right onto his toe. De Bruyne-level quality.

First half was his best performance as CF for us by a distance. Still wild obviously, but really caused Brighton a problem.

As with a lot of these YouTubers / influencers, whatever you want to call them, once their initial ISP starts to wane in popularity, they attempt to pivot/diversify in order to try and attract new numbers, and that often involves something a bit more extreme in its nature.

Interesting. You wonder how long it will be before a football club makes a similar decision.