Nine

The key with Wood is we needed a striker in quickly at the time to provide the team with structure, Gayle wouldn’t have provided that like Wood has. He’s been poor in front of goal, the bloke looks like he hasn’t got a shred of confidence about him whenever the balls dropped to him and he’s had a chance.. there’s been a few headers that he should have 100% buried. Besides his lack of goals (and assists) the most important thing is he gave us that structure and presence we needed up top, at the very least hes been committed and worked hard from the front. I know it was £25m and yes we could have got a different player for the same outcome for half of that but at the time we had no idea he wouldn’t be scoring, he’d been poor for Burnley since the summer but his overall prem record is good.. tbh I don’t think he’s had great service or is even very suited to our side but he has blown the chances he has got. I guess what I’m saying is that he’s been very effective in his overall role but just hasn’t got the 4/5 goals you might have expected he would.. I’d keep him around as a 3rd choice for a season or 2 but nothing more.

Silly season has started then..

You could argue we might have a better squad than Everton but I absolutely agree with the sentiment. We have a long road ahead break into the top 6, we have to remember we were owned by Ashley only one transfer window ago. We are still at the building block stage of our evolution and depending on a lot of factors we could even still be in almost the same position next summer, lots of things need to go right before we starting talking about top 6 or top 4.. Howe defo backed himself into a corner with some fans with that good run we went on and it’s raised some peoples expectations way beyond what is reasonable right now. Top half would be great for next season, I’m more focused on the direction of our style of play along with who we bring in as much as our league position. Todays result hasn’t changed anything, this was case yesterday and last week and the week before that.

This is the exception though, not the rule. We played well during that good run but there was a bit more fortune involved in our goals than Howe would have liked I guarantee you, our attacking build up play hasnt been great with the almost majority of our goals coming from set pieces. Looking forward to the reminder though hopefully you are right

I completely disagree, signing 4 or 5 to that level is unlikely alone but on top of that you've got to get those players playing.. if they are coming from abroad theres a big chance they dont hit the ground running. We'd be very lucky to pull that off even with a £100m+ spend. We are at the very first stage of our evolution and will be for all next season, I personally would be very happy with a top 10 finish next year.

No reason why we cant achieve it but many reasons that suggest we wont achieve it.

Burn losing his head the entire second half isnt a good look for him

Bit of a wake up call for some of our fans hopefully, we have a long way to go

Our good run raised far to manys expectations, some of our fans are already calling for top 6 or even 4th next season. People get carried away far to easily.

As much as I'd like him to achieve that here its unlikely

Howes record against the top 6 is horrific

Game over

So poor from Wood

Leicester will score if they keep this up

YESS

Fair strike tbf

Here we go

Conte is a boss

Uh oh

I think he’s a real possibility, ticks all the boxes that Howe might look for. Pricey though.

Agreed that this isn’t on Ragnick. I think him being brought in was an experiment to see how close that squad is to evolving into where someone like Ten Hag would want it to be, he’s thrown this squad in at the deep end with the ultra press style and seen who can swim. Looks like hardly any of them can, a rotten dressing room to the core.. will take a couple of transfer windows for him to them even close to what he would want them to be.

Best pitch invasion I've ever seen I think Was like watching something from the 80s

Unreal this, they might stay on the pitch all night