Holmesy

Oh, is that what it is?! I thought you had something wrong with you pal. My apologies. Laughing at people after you put forward shit opinions with no factual or statistical basis doesn’t paint you in a very good light. It just makes you look like an arsehole. Have a bit more humility and you might get taken more seriously.

You might even be right, but people who use laughing emojis at the end of every posts rarely are 😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀

😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀 you’re wrong! 😀😀😀😀😀😀😉

Wasn’t the whole criticism of Howe that he didn’t put Burn at CB? He kept Livra at RB, put Krafth at CB (and we conceded immediately) Burn at LB and only changed it when Livra got injured.

I’m not sure I follow - Burn played LB for most of that game didn’t he?! Granted, it’s too early to say that this is a trend (as I said in an early post 👆🏻) and we’re now defensively solid, but there has visibly been a difference defensively in addition to the numbers. We’ll see, harder tests lie ahead but I feel much more confident with Lewis at LB than I have with Burn for most of this season. When you’re conceding 3 goals per game, something is badly wrong. We’re weaker at RB, the keeper is the same, one of the CBs is the same. What else has changed?

I’ll politely disagree. He has clearly been our weakest link for a long time this season. It’s too early to say we’ve become more defensively solid because it’s only two games, but in those two games we’ve conceded 1 goal, 0.5 per game. Our average for the past 10 or so games (with Burn at LB) has been 2.46 ish per game. It looks like the combination of a proper LB and BDB now at CB has eradicated a lot of our defensive frailty. Nothing else has really changed. We were under the cosh today, as we have been in a lot of games lately, and yet we kept a clean sheet this time.

A bad one, gone very wrong

I think what the last 2 games have shown is is that despite Lewis Hall not being the complete article, the Dan Burn at LB experiment should never be repeated. It has been a shit idea for a while and seemingly grossly unfair on a very talented CB. I’m so pleased he’s been given the chance (through unplanned circumstance rather than by design) to remind us what a quality player he is in his natural position. A definite candidate for MOTM in both recent games

We’ve gone from conceding 2.5 per game to conceding 0.5 per game, since playing with a proper left full back and BDB in his actual position. It’s too early to say it’s a trend but we’ve looked so much better defensively the past couple of games. And Burn has been outstanding in both games. Our general play didn’t warrant that victory at all but keep clean sheets and you can grind out results. Fucking brilliant 3 points!

Fucking pussy! He knows it’s not a foul and he wouldn’t have to watch it 15 times if it’s an obvious refereeing error. Just an easy way out. The game is gone, it’s absolutely fucked

This is the worst I’ve ever seen Murphy play, and he’s put in some stinkers in the past. 65 minutes of utter dogshit!

We’ve got 3 championship players all playing on that right hand side, and funnily enough we haven’t created a single fucking thing down there. You can carry one sub-par player, maybe 2 at push, but put 3 around each other and it’s going to cause huge problems.

Do we not practice with a football?! It’s like they’ve never seen the fucking thing before

What does £25m buy you these days though? Or does selling Bruno free up loads more than £100m? I don’t understand the nuances of FFP. We’d probably have to spend £40-50m on a top drawer CM to replace Bruno. A top class RW is going to set us back probably the same. We also need a backup RW, maybe £20m? And we still need another 2-3 after that. It seems like selling Bruno might be the only way to fund the rebuild we need. He’s instrumental in everything good we do, so I’d hate to see him leave, but we can’t go into another season with players like Murphy, Almiron, Longstaff, Lascelles, Burn etc. as regular starters if we want to challenge. It might be one step back to move 2 forward.

good luck!

You clearly have the expert’s eye, STM. Quite the analyst.

Pep has constantly evolved his teams and ways of executing his plan throughout his entire career. His Man City team now looks nothing like his dominant Barca team for example. It’s such a poor reference mate. You’ve literally done the opposite of what you thought you were doing by referencing Pep. We’ve seen the need to evolve this season because what worked last season is a point of vulnerability this season. Injuries will have played a part for sure, but you have to adapt your system to the personnel you have available, right?

And it was great while it lasted. But it doesn’t work now. Whether we’ve been found out, the fixture congestion has fucked all of our players, Joelinton being injured etc. People keep pointing to last season. Last season isn’t this season. We have the 5th worst defence in the league. That’s the reality!

I don’t think I buy the Trippier argument -each time he’s been forced to play two actual fullbacks we looked more balanced and more effective as a team.

All fair points. The Burn one feels a bit like he’s trying to be too clever and not wanting to back down. The concept of having a CB who drops into a back 3 is ok - it works for City and Arsenal but the difference is they’re not doing it with the slowest player in the PL. They’re executing it with mobile CBs who could feasibly play as conventional full backs if they wanted to. We’re shoe-horning a guy who isn’t suited to the position in any way into the position and making ourselves defensively vulnerable in the process. If we weren’t shipping 3 goals a game, it would be harder to argue against. The Lewis Hall thing has just been baffling to be honest. I understand he’s a work in progress but when you’re watching your setup ship relegation levels of goals, there’s no risk to trying something different. I’ll never understand his mentality through that run of games and I hope it never repeats, but if we end the season in the European places, hopefully we can just put it behind us a bad chapter and a learning experience.

I think there were posts suggesting it even further back than that. At times it has felt like stubbornness was the only thing stopping him from doing it because it blatantly wasn’t working - conceding 3 goals per game is absurd! Who knows, maybe he just wants to see a couple of top Geordie lads living out their dreams before they’re moved on for better players. I would say there’s no room for sentiment in football but it would at least make sense of the situation and I could get on board with it more if that was the case.

Yes I am. The former cost us a lot of goals in a very poor run, and Longstaff needs no explanation. We haven’t necessarily had the players available to swap out Longstaff until now, but with Burn the performances from Tino and now Hall (and then Burn being a rock at CB last night) raise legitimate questions about some of Eddie’s decision making.

The one area he definitely needs to be more ruthless is dropping his favourite players when they play shit, which they have for large parts of this season.

Amazing what happens when you play players in their actual positions. I’d genuinely started to dislike Dan Burn because of his nightmare performances at LB but he was top drawer tonight, absolute warrior!

Thank God we don’t have to play the shit fuckers again this season. That fucking song they sing with the high pitch noise is one of the most cringeworthy things I’ve witnessed from a group of football supporters. Fucking weirdos!