Dr Jinx

Wasn’t that always the point of the baseless story coming out in first place. Players should be a little more wise to it but they have phones like the rest of us and read the same bollocks. He’s had a few off games but overall I think the message from the manager is confusing more than just 1 of the players. We want to be a pressing counter attacking team or we don’t. We can’t do possession if that’s our plan. In possession we get moved around too easily and suddenly holes are everywhere. Liverpool were able to do it with 10 men.. let us knock is about aimlessly and then got us out of shape and ripe for a few errors to be punished. You can’t blame that on individuals on the pitch. They’re just doing what’s being asked of them.

They shared the job at the same time. My suggestion is slightly different, you just have a different coach to come in and keep things fresh. I’ll explain my line of thinking. When keeping much of the same squad, take Leeds back in the early 00’s as an example. George Graham was in there and had a well drilled defence but with a side with little flair. O’Leary came in and added that, yet the side didn’t lose the defensive fundamentals. It takes about a season and a half for a squad to forget what a previous manager had implemented. Yet can pick up new idea fairly quickly. It’s nothing new, Man Utd did this for years. SAF wasn’t a coach and didn’t do any coaching. He was a shop steward.. he ran everything aside from the playing bit. He gave more responsibility to coaches and took the credit for their work. He also knew exactly when a refresh was needed. You have to give him that.

Trying not to overreact, we sound like ungrateful shits to complain about a few L’s.. am mindful of that. Bit like you all I spend a lot of time thinking about what am seeing going wrong, more time thinking about why. I’ll be honest, I think we were lucky to get top 4.. you have 3 teams who massively underperformed (Liverpool, Chelsea, Spurs), so much so in fact that we didn’t need to be amazing to get over the line with it. So if those mentioned clubs have sorted their shit out and we’re still treading water, then we’re going backwards before we start. I think we can all agree we didn’t have a transfer window that was for the here and now. So where are we at? I think a sort of rot started setting in once we got to league cup final. Yes we had some great wins in this time but overall form was patchy. We’ve carried that into new year. Teams have figured us out to a degree. Villa looked good against us until Mings got injured. Result could have been different hypothetically. My point I guess is that there’s a case to be made that it’s not a knee jerk reaction but more of an overall realisation that we’ve run out of steam a bit and tactically we’re exposed. Can Howe turn it around? Yes, but he needs to dig deep.. If I was a club owner I’d have 2 managers who rotate every season. Slightly different attributes etc.. and let each one take time out from the game to up-skill after every second season. Howe would benefit massively from this. And would keep things fresh. My alternative to Howe would be maybe someone like Potter.. a coach who seems more comfortable training them to keep the ball. Or you could have the other manager coach the reserve team every second year. Imagine the young players getting that sort of education.

Something is amiss and at the end of the day, it’s down to him. He’ll be under massive pressure. Imagine shutting up shop at 3-0 down. Fuck off man. Do better.

Aye, best of luck to the lad. There was something that always troubled me though.. when Rafa was here, he made a point of talking about the difficulties with his family situation, he had a sick child iirc and was doing lots of travel as they were getting treatment in London. It was a serious consideration to leave at that point. But then Bruce came in and he signs a long term deal.. it made no sense unless he was happier with the easy training.

Very hard to make out if it’s him or not but can’t imagine the club will be too happy with him if it is. They don’t need any bad press, the usual suspects will have a field day.

Our game plan for changing things up simply can’t be.. Wilson and Barnes on. I’m still angry about this today. Even before they scored, we’d already retreated back.. they changed something and we were totally oblivious to it until it was too late. He was out-thought by Klopp as the game wore on and it didn’t look like we believed we could or should win. He deserves plenty of time to get that right but it’s the first alarm bell I’ve really had with him as a coach with us.

It's an opportunity to bring in a CB who can cover both sides. If Botman is out for a month we need to act. Burn or Lascelles at CB are not an option if we want to stay in it by end of September.

So if it was Eddie Howe picking a side and someone let him down massively, that player would be dropped. No matter what has happened in the past. There’s no room for sentimentality when you want to achieve something. He has to be fair game when it comes to a match like that. Total inability to adjust to having an extra man and/or taking advantage of it. Shocking subs which made the side weaker. He needs to do better.

Boat loads of scousers coming over regularly? Our crime rates are already high enough ?

Love how they name check us with some vague descriptions of things that are obviously nothing to do with us. Sela deal? PL signed off on it. Adidas deal wouldn’t fall under same criteria. The Saudi league isn’t anything directly to do with us and even the Maxi sale was intentionally low I reckon. PIF are playing 4D chess right now and are several moves ahead. Clubs like Spurs and Liverpool are feeling the squeeze.. it’ll be the others turn in a season or so. Eventually they’ll turn attention to City but they’re years ahead in terms of development right now.

Every time I feel confident before playing these, something always goes awry. We know what they’ll do. Direct, pace down the wings and middle. We need to be smarter in terms of who we push forward and when as they’ll look to catch us out. These are a bogey side for sure and we need to get that monkey off our backs so we can finally push on. Think we’re all desperate for it. The team need to take the emotion out of it though. These can be beaten if we play the team and not the occasion.

I must say I liked Fraser, he was never all that good but he had a few decent games for us and always seemed a decent sort when being interviewed. But whatever went on must have been poor if it came to that, I can’t imagine it was all about money either. Football is a weird sport for a grift.. like there’s suckers in every single team in every single league. Fraser would have gotten those wages elsewhere. If he was leaking stuff to the press I’d say that would have been enough for no road back.. they run a tight ship now. Pure speculation though..

Solid window. 8/10 for me. Upgrades pretty much all round however I don’t think we’ve signed a transformational player but I’m also aware that players like Willock are a lot better than we usually remember. We don’t know what our most effective first 11 is yet and probably won’t until next month at some stage.

The jersey we used for 95/96 and 96/97 more than makes up for any missteps after. Besides we were totally declining on the pitch for years after so it didn’t really matter.

If you watch boxing you’ll get the reference but I liken the way City play to how Usyk fights.. his footwork is so good he can literally just wear out opponents by keeping them moving about and trying to guess where the attack will come from. His opponents over commit to attacks and again, the footwork is so good he’s rarely there when they do attack so they just waste more energy.

Man for man I think we can compete. Tactically they were one step ahead of us and they have the ability to unleash players like Foden in areas of the pitch that will hurt us time and again. We're not quite there yet. We gave them almost too much respect. Seemed to snatch at any half chance we got instead of playing how we usually can. Mentally the players need to step up and not be intimidated by games like this and the manager also needs to come with a better game plan. In hindsight I would have started with some of the players who came on late and unleashed “first teamers” when the game opened up a bit.

He had a poor game, but he wasn’t the only one to have a brain fart when he had the ball in promising positions.

We were chasing shadows for large portions and there wasn’t much he could do. Hopefully coming off a bit early will keep him fresh, has to be starting games.

They had a spell where they looked like scoring and that’s what happened. We’ve been pretty well disciplined and it looks like we can hurt them if we relax a bit more on the ball and stick to basics. Annoyed at those yellows. It limits us. Keep AG on for a while though.. he’s the only one who can cope with their pace on our left side.

We can mix it with these for sure. Played them away when we were in a dip last season yet still had a few chances on goal. Also noted that BoyleSports had us at 4/1 yesterday, now into 3’s

They don’t have to help us but it’s not like we’re mugging them.. it’s still a decent fee for a very young player.

Pure opportunism. There's no way Chelsea would be selling their best prospects unless they were strangled into it. It's still a lot of money but there's plenty of potential there. I also don't think we're done yet. A RCB will arrive too.

He kind of looks like what would happen if Eddie Howe and Matt Ritchie had a steroid baby together.

The transfer thread on the Liverpool forum is a very funny read.. the Premier League’s “flat earthers” The conspiracy is that we’re helping Chelsea out with their FFP by offering way over the odds for a “bang average player” ?