St. Maximin

I think he isn’t tbh. You get strikers playing in mid table teams that don’t have his goal record, yet he consistently plays for a terrible team that finishes bottom. Same with Mitrovic. I’m sure most of these ‘Championship strikers’ would score plenty with reasonable service.

Victor Anichebe DJ Campbell

I always think Perez exemplifies the harsh treatment that attacking midfielders/wingers who also can play as strikers get (another example being Rashford, poor as he’s been recently). They don’t play as out-and-out strikers and play positions not much different to wingers that won’t get near to double figures in goals, but don’t get near the same level of criticism. Pretty sure Perez has often played a very similar to role to Fraser and Almiron, who don’t get abuse despite very low goals and assists numbers.

Of course but a comparison is always going to be flawed. Rafa was there from the start of the season and had no poor run of form to pick them up from, whereas Lampard had to take over a team near the relegation zone where morale was clearly very low having lost 9 from 13 - form was also even worse therefore. Whatever other issues there are at that club (loads I imagine), Rafa was terrible.

I don’t see much evidence they’d be in a much better position, if at all, if he’d stayed. They were on the decline for weeks before his sacking, so it’s not like Lampard has made them any worse really. The guy is a legend but it won’t work out everywhere for him and it’s fair to say he made mistakes there if the people that follow the club think so. Surely Lampard was faced with a pretty uphill task anyway given the sorry state of the team when he took over, as opposed to Rafa at the season start, so Rafa has to take blame for that even if the club’s issues do run much deeper.

To be fair while I always wanted him to get a good few months, I was questioning whether he could make us solid enough for a relegation battle. Delighted he’s proven me wrong and gone above that!

Should have got Rafa in while we had the chance tbh.

The new James Perch.

Sorry for the ignorance, but what is ‘athletic’ anyway?! Physical attributes combined? Only so many centre mids have them all I’d have thought. Certainly makes up for it with his technical ability! Also he’s mint.

Fair enough He’s a knob and a crap manager but they can still get things right from time to time. His overall record shows his limitations though. The HBA handling criticism I find interesting also, as I was fuming at it but tbf Pardew is hardly alone there. The player seems to fall out with everyone who manages him… at some point the player might be part of the problem

These things are easy to say, but he was the manager then so you can’t just take all that away from him and it’s how managers are judged ultimately. When you look at the bigger picture and the other three years though you can judge his overall performance much better. He’s still a bad manager as we’ve seen at his other clubs and a personality to match also. Still, there’s nothing wrong with looking back fondly on his time here.

To be fair looking back fondly on his time isn’t the same as looking back fondly on him. We had some great moments then, especially with that 5th place finish. I look back fondly on that year of course and then some fun nights in Europe. FWIW there was a load of filth in there but maybe he got something right also to help us do so well that year (having a great team and Liverpool and Chelsea being poor were the main reasons mind). Also when he left we were midtable and then almost got relegated under the best coach in the league and did the following year.

I’ll happily admit he was frustrating me tonight, but I find some of the criticism he gets very harsh. He’s been excellent for most of his time here - some poor recent performances having potentially not been fully fit firstly shouldn’t detract from that, but also I think we’re used to him being so good that we judge him much more harshly. Granted he is frustrating given his ability, but his ability is actually ridiculous - I don’t know how many of the best attacking players in the world have the combined pace and dribbling ability that compares with his, yet he plays for us and not a CL club, so he’s obviously going to be inconsistent and make bad decisions etc. Pretty sure I’d almost always take that kind of player (who is also clearly out of form) than one of those wingers you can “trust” but ultimately just isn’t very good (thinking Ritchie, Gouffran, Jonas etc.).

Nah that’s unrealistic. No way would they start as early as 10am.

Football commentator, Robot Wars commentator and French translator, but he cannot translate Arabic. Proof Jonathan Pearce has his limits.

I think you’ve summed him up well there. That doesn’t mean people criticising him think he’s ‘shit/boring/clueless’. They might just think he’s similar to how you’ve described him. In general I find when managers get criticism people react too much like their critics think the manager is terrible and wants him sacked, when really they are often commenting on their limitations as you might with a player you still like. I’ve said before I like Southgate and by no means want him sacked soon, but I do question some of his moves. As above the with Mount I always find a funny one - great player without doubt, but when we are blessed with attacking talent not sure what he was offering us on left-wing in the Euros final.

Personally I love the bloke, but I agree with some of the criticism he got from that Euros final. I think a lot of people were just frustrated and there were some knee-jerk reactions after the final, but at the same time as we might with players, it’s very reasonable to criticise anyone when they’re doing things wrong, even if their standards are normally high. Same with Rafa for example also - did terrific here but he made some questionable decisions irrespective of his record, but criticising them shouldn’t mean you want the guy sacked. Not that people are saying that here, but I know some people who react like that. Still think we should have won with that home advantage, but it’s still anyone’s game on the day. Onwards and upwards. Can’t knock that record and we’ve gone from semis to finalists, so naturally we’ll win the next World Cup anyway.

While I don’t think Howe should be asked these questions, they’re a natural consequence of the takeover. What I’m more annoyed by are the reactions on social media criticising him for being part of the ‘sportswashing project’. I’m not sure what he is supposed to say? It’s not only not something he is meant to talk about, but he may not even be trained to handle the questions well so it’s best to say nothing. Speaking of sportswashing, I might just be ignorant but I still don’t know what clear examples there are of it - in this case or previously. To me seems like one of those coined phrases that gets raised every time a country with poor human rights records invests invests in major sporting events/teams, without evidence of how it’s worked and why it’s so bad. I’m not saying it isn’t a thing, but certainly for us I don’t see the concerns - the clearest examples so far are a minority of whoppers on Twitter acting as Saudi apologists. Surely any sportswashing intentions would have gone deeper than that? That said I cannot help feel slightly uncomfortable about the takeover though. That’s out of guilt about enjoying the support of a nation that has done terrible things, but I don’t see them widely becoming heroes to the west through this takeover while maintaining their abuses, so I don’t really see sportswashing as the issue. If they really wanted to improve their reputation they could have just not killed 81 people the other day, as it’s not like none of us would hear about it…

They clearly just need to dust their axes down, roll their sleeves up and go again.

On those lines aye. I don’t really know much about the PIF power structure. I know MBS is the chair so that makes things a bit more awkward… but not sure how much day to day involvement he has in PIF, let alone us! It’s a state-owned entity that employs civil servants to invest in different industries to help develop and diversify the Saudi economy. Sure they’re not all nasty blokes! Saying that if Bin Salman directly bought us and called all the shots, I’d certainly feel less comfortable. But that’s not essentially the case here right…?

The fans who feel obliged to now defend Saudi Arabia are just idiots and not really people we need to focus on. Every club has idiots in their fan base and luckily I don’t think the actions of these are cause for major ‘sportswashing’ concerns. They’re a small minority and aren’t bringing about major change in KSA’s reputation here. To do that KSA will simultaneously need to keep changing its laws over time too. Fwiw I still feel a bit uncomfortable about this and leaving aside human rights comparisons with the other countries, our connection to a state is even closer than Man City’s and Chelsea’s. However, I also don’t feel I have to apologise for the Saudis as a conflicted fan, to criticise their human rights record whenever we score a goal or publicly concern myself with our Saudi apologist fans etc. I also don’t feel we have to hate everything about them - we talk about how ‘evil’ our owners are but they’re an investment fund that accumulated wealth through oil. I don’t get the impression that people who order the execution of people without fair trial are also involved in the day to day running of our club. Maybe that’s me being sportswashed then, but I can’t lie and say I don’t enjoy their involvement in our club.

Kind of do yeah. I work in a bank and had to read about a few big name oligarchs last year to escalate any key info the bank didn’t know. I understood he would be able to do that based in the OFAC sanctions I read about as that’s how other sanctioned oligarchs still had loose ties to the bank’s clients. Not sure if these rules are much stricter though.

Good points, articulated much better than I could! I guess it’s a complex issue but to me the main benefit of improving a reputation is economic, so I’m a bit surprised it’s seen as a human rights issue. The human rights issues are sadly there regardless - I almost think groups like AI talk about ‘sportswashing’ to make their concerns seem more relevant. The abuses are the problem here, not the attempt to change a reputation. I don’t think it’s logical to assume these states are making a calculated attempt to hide their atrocities while pleasing westerners, or that it would really have the desired effect if so. Saying that, the more angry I feel about Russia due to its current widely broadcasted atrocities, the less comfortable I feel about Saudi Arabia. Not due to sportswashing; just simply being associated with my team…

I will say sportswashing exists, but it’s not the major human rights issue people make it out to be. I just see it used as a negative term but without the evidence to show it is such a terrible thing - almost like it doesn’t need it. The concern people have is the laundering of a reputation through sports investment, but I’m yet to see this working the way people suggest. Surely as long as human rights abuses are being committed, the positive attitudes towards a country won’t eradicate the coverage of the abuses - not on a particular grand scale anyway. I doubt the Russia World Cup, while no doubt a great experience for fans, has massively changed the perception of the country - at least not to the point it took an unprovoked war to make people realise how immoral it is. Where sportswashing does work as intended is it helps generate tourism and investment et al through becoming more relevant to the daily lives of people abroad. That’s not a bad thing overall though? In less positive terms there’s the issue I know we’ve discussed about Newcastle fans defending KSA, having Saudi flags on Twitter profiles and wearing tea towels etc. Not ideal of course, but to me it’s not a major issue in the grand scheme of things when they’re a small minority of fans that make up a small minority of football fans in the UK, let alone the world!