Kid Icarus

He's completely ruined his reputation now, mind. 3 pivotal roles in as many years, failure at Man United and the whole email debacle. What a hapless nugget.

It's definitely cheered me up after yesterday. Schadenfreude is a decent alternative if your own team is misfiring.

Wonder what the reason is? They realised he's a glorified facilitator and not an actual DoF? Ashworth being untrustworthy and unreliable in the long-term? Ratcliffe being a 'no nonsense' vampire capitalist cunt? Will be interesting to find out.

You get the feeling everyone got what they deserved.

Incredible

It's not even wrong, he could be even better than he already is, has missed sitters, and will likely want to improve. Tbf though it's critique that applies much more to Gordon than anyone, his finishing doesn't just need improvement, it's been shocking overall.

Imo It just depends on whether someone's one of your untouchables or not where any criticism is concerned. Isak is, Howe isn't. Isak's a fantastic player and his record is great but it's not at all ilegitimate to say that despite all that he's also missed a lot of sitters this season and could improve in those situations. Considering how often you preface your criticism of Howe with disclaimers about what you rate about him, I would have thought you'd appreciate there's nuance.

He said it was a factor in there naturally being a lot of individual errors in the match overall and that it made it a scrappy game, but that it couldn't be blamed at all for the goals we conceded. He made the point after saying the reason we lost was because our defending was shit and we made errors that cost us. The Chronicle know what they're doing using a throwaway comment like that and putting it front and centre.

He didn't say it tbf, Chronicle shit-stirring basically

Completely ignored the point but whatever

The point is Isak can still be criticised much like Howe can without being a clown for doing so.

Howe's win rate being only bettered by Keegan doesn't stop you criticising him like.

I don't think it needs defending tbh, his record and his impact speaks for itself. Or it should anyway.

The criticism of the Barnes signing is mental imo like. Really weird.

I don't think that tells anywhere near the full story about our PSR situation.

A few things but I think the main one this season is that shambolic transfer window, and PSR overall. It's the elephant in the room and it's not only holding Howe back, but will also hold back any elite manager from coming here imo (if you're of the opinion that's what we should do)

One of the problems Howe has at the moment is that he doesn't have the kudos to make people look elsewhere when things go downhill. Guardiola and Emery have that advantage now, Rafa had it with us, Mourinho more or less promotes it, Ancelotti had it at Everton, Klopp had it in 22/23. They have the CVs to ward off fingers being widely pointed at them and the reasonable assumption is that the problems lie elsewhere - be it PSR, injuries, scouting and recruitment etc. Howe is imo in a position where although there are reasonable criticisms to aim at him, he's nowhere near the main reason for our faltering position. Any of the above in the same situation gets the benefit of any doubt and a grace period, rightly so. Howe doesn't get that benefit to the same extent because although he has a very impressive CV, his achievements are so far much less tangible in terms of the bottom line - trophies. However, that doesn't mean that like with some of the examples above there isn't an incredible manager in bad circumstances, who'll show how incredible they are when the circumstances improve and can't be blamed.

I get that it's part of Brentford's style of play, but it really is becoming a bit of a pattern that teams take what little chances they have against us. That's Everton, Brighton, Chelsea, West Ham, Man City and now Brentford where we've dropped points despite their xG against us being below ours, not a good sign.

It would be if I went along with the premise, but I don't think he's lost the dressing room.

Seems like we maybe should have rotated more if anything. 2 games in a week at his age will make mistakes more likely. Brilliant on Wednesday, shocking today, likewise (albeit to a lesser extent) Joelinton.

For the record, nothing's changed for me after that really. Still nowhere near enough to blame that I can pin on him uniquely, for me that's pivotal.

Tonali lost possession a few times in dangerous positions and didn't protect our back 4 like, so not sure about that one. Joelinton didn't cover himself in glory for the first goal, but I didn't really put our conceded goals down to our midfield. Not that I think he was uniquely bad either. For me Gordon was the real doubling-down on our capitulation. Not only was he poor, but him being there also took away from Barnes, Isak, Murphy and Hall. All of who were having effective games in an attacking sense.

That's hindsight talking, we had momentum in an attacking sense at that point.

Yeah, I don't think we should have started with the players who, when they came on, caused us to completely fall apart and all had very poor individual performances, personally. Longstaff and Murphy did more than their jobs worth today. They had nothing to do with our defending and our attacking play was good, coherent and had end product with them on. Bringing on Gordon (forcing Barnes to the right), then just throwing the kitchen sink at it with Tonali, Wilson, Almiron, Trippier all on ended our attacking threat altogether.