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We're certainly short of confidence at the moment at not playing anywhere near the standards we've been blessed with the past 2 years but there's not a single atom of me that sees this as any of Howe's doing. No club could plan for the sheer number of injuries we've had this year and no club could sustain the quality of football we've played historically with those injuries. We have a really big January window coming up.

I would probably recognise the mistakes he'd made at worst and move past them pretty quickly seeing as he's scored 30 goals in each of his last 2 seasons for us. Perspective and context is important.

We'll win them in the future. We need to get the finances and prestige to get to that point though.

Very much up for debate. Don't think we should risk missing a single point in the tightest race for CL in years.

I worry about how an injury to Bruno would impact us. We desperately need someone who like Bruno, is press proof and able to open up the game, it's such a key part of our success. Miley may have it buts it's still far too early in his development to give him that responsibility imo and Tonali doesn't have those same qualities from the little I've seen of him.

Big Miggy fan but I'm not sure what Gordon did wrong to be taken off instead of him. Thought he was sloppy throughout the game.

Proud of that effort. Not the result we wanted but my gut feeling before this game - and I know it was potentially only 2 more games - was I'd rather put all our energy and resources into requalifying than having an extended run at the expense of it.

18 months down the line and I still can't process or accept how good we actually are.

Maybe I was a bit complacent with this.

He was excellent today and I don't want to take anything away from how good he was but their right back was turbo shit.

Would like him to continue a little further up the pitch, he's just got a knack for getting into good goalscoring positions.

There's about 5 clubs in the world that can afford a £100m player and he's gonna have to play spectacularly well for someone to trigger it. It's not an ideal scenario but £100m would make a HUGE difference to our long term prospects were it to arrive in our bank accounts. I'm happy to have this ticked off tbh.

On a side note, I don't think it's too far fetched to say we haven't played well as a result of the quality of the opposition we've faced. How many times last year was it the other way round for opposing fans who claimed they were shit and we just caught them on a bad day when in reality it was because we made them look bad? Same thing's happening now.

Yeh, I referenced that in my post. We're at par points wise and haven't played particularly well, I'll worry when we don't play well and don't get the points we expect.

I'm not sure what the point of this post is mate.

Aston Villa 3 Man City 0 Liverpool 1 Brighton 1 Brentford 3 AC Milan 0 How many point would people have expected from the above run in? I'd have said 8 realistically. If anything, I'm slightly encouraged by the fact we're probably on par with expectations and it hasn't even clicked for us yet.

My initial thoughts on him so far is he's very good on the ball and I'm excited to see how we can best utilise that but he's not as impactful as others off it, and we're perhaps suffering as a result of that. Early days yet and certainly encouraged by some of the things I've seen from him but not 100% convinced just yet that he's the right fit us at the moment.

Buzzing with that draw

I've been a big fan of Miggy and still think he'll get 10 this year but I just wish he was more direct and more willing to go on the outside a bit more even if that meant losing the ball a bit more. Everytime he cuts inside he holds up momentum and gives our opposition time to reorganise, it's a small flaw but one that I think really impacts our game.

We were just so passive with our build up play today. Alot of times where we found ourselves in good positions and turned back on ourselves. Alot to unpick today.

By that definition we'd need about 18 new high calibre players for a 10.

You wanted a minimum of 7 signings this window?

The thing is I don't think he needs to change too much, it's just a case of getting better players into the system and the results will follow - I think he's got the mentality of the team in an incredibly strong place.

Just got so much faith in the fact that he'll really study and learn from every negative result. Just pure elite mentality.

Think it's perfectly valid to point out out his qualities as a player that we might miss against the top sides who are very organised and difficult to break down, something that's perhaps missing with Gordon, Almiron and Barnes as our wide options.