Nine

Seems like him and Burn are the scapegoats recently. Sometimes Willock or Murphy as well, it’s sad.

I have no idea, you’d have to ask someone else

Without trying to get my tongue to far up, you were really good today. Really exploited us in midfield and made it count. Fair play and enjoy it.

The better team won today, some of the emotional outburst will be aimed towards Burn but the reality is NO ONE played well today. They dominated the midfield from the first minute and that’s okay, they are a good side now under Emery. Onto the next.

Fair play to Villa, better team today with most of ours failing to adjust to the pace of their game

Really tough game here, they had our number first half and are dangerous on the counter now we are pushing.

It would be nice to give players a fair chance before we get all hyperbolic. Villa have done well so far, we need to either try and match the pace they are playing at or adjust.

Poor from Gordon here, looks like he clearly needs more minutes in this side. I think we’ll come out looking a lot better second half.

As expected, solid reaction here. Howe will guide him into channeling that energy in the right way, this kid is hungry.

Not sure if it’s been mentioned yet but Willock is a very intelligent player and can read the game at a high level, he makes clever runs that relieve pressure when out of possession and pulls midfielders/defenders when we have it. I feel it goes unnoticed a lot, I don’t feel any of our other CMs can do the same.

Not a surprise, his body can’t hold up to the intensity of our system. He just isn’t a solid fit for this squad physically as I’ve probably said on here about 10 times now. The accumulation of muscle injuries just doesn’t improve over time, it gets worse.

There’s more to it than this but generally Rafa did a very solid job with the tools he had available, how could he not deploy a defensive style when we had Joselu as our main striker during 17/18? Rafa gets labelled as ‘negative’ because people perceive that he’s defensive under any circumstance.. that’s not the truth. Pragmatic and careful yes, but that doesn’t always equal negative. With a better squad he’d have adjusted here to a much more positive style as we had a glimpse of for 6 months or so when we signed Miggy.

Demolition job

Or shit yourself because you don’t like that a player was subbed off after being subbed on and got frustrated. It’s not that deep, he wants to play.

He wants to play, if managed correctly the situation isn’t a negative.

Amazing recovery from the first half, 3 points away there is massive for us at this stage

Could say that about the PL after our game the other night tbf

Yeah Bowen is a perfect fit for us, literally ticks every box.

I really think hes going to be one of our top performers next season

This game is one of those where you’d take a point before hand, they won’t roll over and give us a free pass like that mess of a team last night.

Can’t take to much from that really, that West Ham performance was one of the worst I’ve ever seen in the PL. Will boost the confidence though surely, and always glad to see Joe get goals.

Clean

Pretty much 4 free goals

No cats were harmed with that goal

Got complacent for the last 10 mins or so