TheBrownBottle

Honestly, it wasn’t much of a dogfight - it was just a low intensity, poor quality game of football. Once we went 2-1 up we played like it was a training match.

Ok, fair dos - apologies from me; clearly a misinterpretation on my behalf

I responded directly to the point in your post - your post looked like it implied that I’d written that they were bottlers.

Not against that Leeds side - or at least it isn’t guaranteed.

I thought they were poor, and didn’t play with any greater intensity than any other side I’ve seen of late - other than Spurs.

I never said that about them. I don’t think anyone has bottled anything. They were desperately poor today from front to back.

I was anticipating a difficult game. The thing is, it wasn’t. Leeds were turgid

I keep seeing people saying he’s injured, but if that’s true why play him? He’s not exactly undroppable at the moment

Nah, that was shite today. It’s not drawing the game that is the issue, that was a performance which would have been equally criticised pre-2021

Had us down the other week for a draw here, but fuck me that was a limp performance. The lack of urgency was frightening. They really miss Longstaff’s harrying in midfield. I’ve seen so many talk about Bruno being the best midfielder since Rob Lee - which he might be - but at the moment he’s also sharing Lee’s trait of tailing off in the second half of the season. Gordon and ASM somehow made us perform worse - Gordon’s habit of stupid challenges and wasting time arguing with the referee is likely to grow old fast, and ASM put in an old school ASM performance. The back line really needs work in the summer - it is being exposed weekly now for its frightening lack of pace. A no 5 and a LB needed in the summer. Though that shouldn’t mean Trippier’s form isn’t looked at critically - and FFS let someone else have a crack with dead balls. Two winnable home games to get the job done. We don’t want to be going to Stamford Bridge needing something - you can bet those fuckers will somehow turn up that day. Still think we’ll do this, but the ‘slow starts’ are becoming standard, and when we don’t get going we’re in trouble.

Play like this and we aren’t getting another point

Isak LW and Willock-Bruno-Joelinton midfield just doesn’t look right for me. Especially the midfield - same one vs Villa and Arsenal. I know Burn is getting his usual hammering but honestly Bruno’s over hitting and under hitting of straightforward passes is now becoming annoying.

Our back line really needs at least one midfielder sat in front of it.

Yes fucking yes hate these twats now wake up lads

Wake up ffs

Yes Pope

I was screaming at Joelinton not to do that. Stupid fucker

This is comically bad so far. Leeds are so utterly shite that they’ve done little with it.

Not only do I think they aren’t, they don’t need to at present.

Burn stood still but that’s pisspoor goalkeeping. Suicidal to push the ball forward

Seriously what the fuck has happened to our back line this last couple of months?

Yep. Also, ‘fan favourite Nobby Solano’ was told he wasn’t needed by Robson either - several years earlier. Don’t get me wrong, Allardyce was fucking shite at NUFC, but why a player being a ‘fan favourite’ should enter a manager’s thinking is beyond me. And of course you’re both spot on re the Modric / Keegan thing. But then, there is a tweet from Hope on this page where he’s talking about Kilcline and Kelly saving NUFC in 92/93, when of course it was the season before, so maybe his NUFC calendar is a Julian one or something and he’s a year out on everything. edit: it would also be canny if Hope would stop writing motivational articles for the opposition before we play them. I bet that cunt Allardyce reads the Mail - he seems the sort. At least wait until afterwards for the hit piece. But then he’s a balloon who writes for a hate rag and thinks the moon landings were fake …

Yep, which is what Berlusconi was at the forefront of. John Hall used to love banging on about joining it. I’ve got on my bookshelf ‘A Pictorial History of Soccer’ published in 1969. In it, there is talk of the ‘inevitability’ of a ‘European Super League’ formed by clubs like Benfica, Celtic and Man Utd (it was 1969). This racket has been around for more than half a century - the constant ‘threat’ of breakaway. The ‘big clubs’ raise it every so often to get more and more of what they want. Ultimately it’s destroyed true European competition and replace it with a staid, boring European Cup with the same seven or eight clubs competing for it again and again and again.

Yeah, fair enough though of course there is a good chance we were genuinely interested in some of them.

Yeah, I think it’s definitely a good thing. One of the few ‘credits in the bank’ for UEFA in recent times