TheBrownBottle

His next three (non-pen) goals after the Liverpool game were from inside the six yard box

Several of Isak’s early goals came from inside the six yard box, and others from not much further out. There weren’t many ‘worldies’ that first season.

Bruno offers more going forward than Tonali - and Tonali is a holding midfielder by trade. Why would we weaken ourselves by playing two players in positions which lessens what both offer? Just seems daft to me. Which is why Howe stopped doing it.

I don’t remember this at all. Isak scored two in his first three games (including one at Anfield - and another which should have stood). Then he was injured for a couple of months, then he scored on his first game back vs Fulham. He went on a run of scoring seven in six before a dry patch the last couple of months of the season. There was no ‘several months’ to get him to do it.

Thanks to PSR, the last window could set us back years. Three of the big money signings have barely had 90 mins between them where they’ve looked at the level. I don’t think anyone right now would pay us the same money we paid for four of them - in the cases of Elanga and Wissa, it’s hard to imagine them being sold in the summer (were they to leave) for anything but a fucking massive loss on the ledger for the year; though that is something which might need to be contemplated to start afresh (both would have one year amortised by that point). I don’t think it can be understated just how disastrous it could prove to be with the current rules in place, also allowing for a drop-off in income next season without CL football. Additionally, we could be further hampered by a loss of PL prize money this season depending on finishing position. We’re not in a position where we can easily absorb massive transfer cock-ups, and we look like we’ve made several in a single window. One of those cock-ups is the notion that you buy squad players - you don’t; you buy players who can improve the first XI and push out previous squad members. You definitely don’t pay first team prices for players who will sit on the bench. edit: who knows, maybe our overlords may finally do us a favour and bail us out of the shit by having a KSA club buy Wissa for £40m in the summer. Wouldn’t hold my breath, though.

The original suggestion was that Howe had players thrust upon him. We didn’t even have the executive staff above Howe to make this complex at all - if he didn’t want to sign them, who did? There was no CEO and no DoF. This was the first window since Jan ‘22 which was a Howe window. That Jan ‘22 window was one of the best in the club’s history - Summer ‘25 may well go down as one of the worst.

Didn’t Howe just say he wants Tonali to shoot more?

Good old Bruno - and it makes sense; Forest and Burnley were a couple of the games I didn’t watch live (I try and watch as many as I can).

Have we scored from outside the box yet this season? I honestly can’t remember one.

I don’t think Isak has anything to do with it - Wissa was brought in to replace Wilson, not Isak. We bought Woltemade as Isak’s replacement. At present, Wissa doesn’t look any better than last season’s version of Wilson.

He was in charge of transfers in the early days. The idea that Howe doesn’t know what he needs is bizarre.

If Howe had a quarter of a billion-worth of players he didn’t want thrust on him in the summer he should have walked, in fact I’d have lost a lot of respect for him if he didn’t. it’s a ridiculous notion.

If I was on the board, I’d be ok-ish with having a season which didn’t work after a poor window, given the previous seasons which Howe has had with the club. What I would want to know is what he plans to do to change it, who he needs to get there and who needs to be sold to accomplish it. The most disappointing part of the summer window isn’t just that the signings weren’t great, they were ‘more of the same’. New ideas needed for me - and there’s no reason Howe isn’t the man to do that.

It’s almost as if the CL isn’t anything like the level of the PL on a weekly basis.

He’s got nothing in his locker which suggests ‘playmaker’ other than ‘he doesn’t have a striker’s instinct’. His game needs a fair amount of development - at present he looks like Shola mk II.

It’s almost as if you actually need to look at a player before signing them

An organisation like PIF will have only one or two people who need to sign off - it’s incompetence not checks and balances on show. Organisations which rely on well-made business cases don’t waste the money they do on vanity projects.

#2 after Beardsley for me

I didn’t say it was good - I said he needed a rest. It’s not good that we don’t have a midfield which can make up for his absence.

The chat on here was - that’s not the same as what Isak was telling the club. It’s pretty apparent he told them he wanted out. I also think Howe would’ve sold quicker but was hamstrung by PIF not wanting to sell.

The problem football has is the ticket pricing - always found it interesting seeing mangers and players grumble about the atmosphere, as if the huge salaries they command has no correlation with it. If you’re paying more for a single match ticket to a run-of-the-mill PL match than I’m paying to take me and Mrs BB Turandot at the Sydney Opera House next week, then you’re absolutely within your rights to expect top-rank entertainment. Football doesn’t always provide that, of course, but the game sets itself up for the grumbles, moans and boos this way. I don’t remember hearing that stuff be anything like as bad when I was a kid - it also didn’t cost anything like as much in relative terms to go to SJP.

He just doesn’t look at the races to me. I keep reading that he’s not a traditional centre forward but a secondary striker, yet he appears to have very few of the attributes that make for really good ‘10s’. His decision-making and distribution aren’t particularly great. Lad needs to just start busting a gut and getting into the right areas. Do the basics right and see if the rest comes with it.

Mrs BB is a dietitian of long-standing and has confirmed numerous times that this is not the case

There is a good chance that’s the case. There would still be time to turn it around, but we don’t look anything like the level of previous seasons. This isn’t a transition, as the formation and tactics look no different. The summer will be really interesting - Howe needs to do a serious amount of in / out transfer business; and that business needs to be an order of magnitude better than what he and his team did last summer.

Next few weeks could be rough - I wonder how Howe will approach it. If the matches go the way this season’s performances suggest they will, it’s going to be a big task turning things around.