David Edgar

Threw a player on so he could make his debut at 0-0 on the opening day of the season against Arsenal ? Fucking fuck me, Steve Bruce you are special.

Chronicle headline: Actual quote from Bruce:

One injury doesn't mean a great deal.

Really should show some respect to the manager who gave him a Premier League career.

Pretty obvious now that Edwards is a patsy.

They're not that good. Should be a close game.

Speeding up our exit and reducing the number of games. Mike will be delighted.

I'm sure they'll strike a 315k deal with Etihad faucets or whatever to cover that.

Waste of time.

Edwards is amusingly silent today.

He really did struggle to get a coherent message across. Like father like son.

Mike Ashley's mouth piece.

If Matt Ritchie says it was full, it was full. End of story.

(very relaxed about it)

And yet Bruce has sanctioned every single transfer

Bruce junior wading in to defend his old man only to offer contradictions to what his Dad said The Bruce family don't appear to be the sharpest.

Doesn't it make sense to swap Martial in this week and then cash in on that price rise next week?

Oh and the reason Longstaff and Schar looked off the boil today was because the plans to which they used to play to, with their passing games, are no longer in effect. Players are playing with freedom and not running the channels and moving into or out of space like they used to. So their options are reduced or they are completely cut out of the possession. I've said it half a dozen times, but S-M coming on and wandering around the pitch, without any thought for the importance of making the correct runs as an attacker, constantly dropping behind the ball so he could get 5 yards of space was embarrassing.

That incident in the second half where our 3 central midfielders all charged to the right side to press tight and left the entire centre of the pitch open Imagine the pure rage on Rafa's face if that had happened last season

I can't believe we've lost a manager who was slowly building a very functional 25 man squad - despite being on a shoestring budget and severe restrictions on the type of player he could bring in - and ended up with a yes man who will happily take the players signed by the club to flip for profit without any consideration as to whether they will form a balanced squad/team or not. Absolutely sickening and it is going to lead to relegation, again.

Tell me how? First half we played fairly well...plenty of good spells with no end product.our attacking play lacked the structure from last season. A lot of effort went into each attack, at the expense of retaining our discipline to avoid being counter attacked. Under no terms did Rafa allow us to play without the positional control needed. There were numerous occasions where we were exposed, but luckily Arsenal were without 3/4 first team attackers and we were not punished. Second half we struggled to get out of our own halfyup, there was no clear strategy to counter Arsenal's growing possession. In the past, Rondon would be very effective at holding up the ball. Ayoze and Almiron would run the channels well and the defence and midfield would play to plan. Obviously, we would need some luck to score enough to win/draw against clubs who have budgets 2/3x what we had, but at least with Rafa you could always see a smart plan in action. With Bruce, the plan was not clever and his in game management turned out to do more harm than good., but still managed one or two half chances. I literally do not remember these?There was many a game under Rafa where we barely had an attempt, and you know there was.yup Stop trying to rewrite history.what?Some of those games were frustrating as fuck, just like today.we were never as ill disciplined as today under Rafa so stop trying to rewrite history.

Today's performance bore no resemblance to how we played under Rafa against the big teams. Nobody in their right mind would say so.

On watching Joelinton and S-M, we 100% have not replaced Ayoze's general play and teamwork. We've lost a player who knew how to attack and defend in equal measure.

First game is never easy to judge a striker. I always think back to Demba Ba playing like Bambi on ice for the first few games and he turned out to be a class act once fit and up to speed. But I can already get a sense of why Rafa was against spending £40m on this guy. It wouldn't surprise me if he ended up with similar or slightly higher goals + assists to Rondon across the season, but without contributing as Rondon would elsewhere. With Rondon we had a leader, an example and someone who put his heart and soul into every facet of the game. Joelinton didn't show any of that today - and I actually thought his holdup play was definitely inferior to Rondon's. For instance, there was a corner in the second half where he proper half-arsed his marking job and the Arsenal player got the header in. No way would Rondon allow that. £16m on Rondon and the rest would strengthen the weaknesses in our squad which have remained untouched.

Frank Lampard's Chelsea getting pasted.