Sempiternal

Good lad, and a good servant to the club. Hope he does well. Always liked him.

I see Barca have unlocked another teenage star. Lamine looks like some boy. Excited @Village Idiot?

They do if Cas is on the slide.

Yeah he would be perfect for us. Really boring but effective player

Wild how many simple passes he gave away, I'm chalking it up to the pace of the league catching him out slightly, he certainly didn't do that for Milan. Off the ball though, yeah he's near perfect

Yeah he’s genuinely decent on his right.

Obviously the defending is suspect but would offer us a lot more than miggy

That being said I do think we'd benefit from someone like Bakayoko, our play is very predictable down the right, and he consistently gets assists, electric dribbler as well. Doubt we will get him, but yeah, would be nice.

Yeah the sample size is way too small, just wanted to see if anything had noticeably differed just compared to watching the games and thinking "we don't seem to cross much".

I'm just having a look at it to see if anything noticeably changed, that was the first thing that stood out. I don't think its totally meaningless, city average a very high amount but yeah agree the sample size is very very small. The only thing that stood out to me yesterday was we had 0 accurate through balls and only one attempt.

Wild, not one accurate through ball played all game by us. We had one through ball all game from Gordon and it's not been recorded as accurate. With Isak we need to be upping that number. Liverpool had 3 attempts and 4 accurate ones

I was having a cursory glance at our team stats so far, to see if anything has changed much, very small sample size, but we are bottom in the league for crosses per game, from averaging 20 last season to just 10 so far. Our average was the third highest last season. Just seemed an interesting change, but obviously its contextual and the sample size is very very small. Only Liverpool averaged more crosses per game than us last season. Seems crazy that we are averaging less than West Ham.

He’s very talented, would be a great signing

Not a chance

Every single manager is under pressure to keep his job tbf, Pep aside.

Fair enough. Robertson has lost a step, agree at his peak though. I wouldn’t personally swap any of their defenders for ours, aside Trent and mainly because of his on ball ability. Keeper is insane of course. I get your point, but the only really glaring missed chance for me was the volley miggy ballooned over. The one that hit the post he created it himself. I didn’t feel like we got in enough dangerous situations playing against ten men. A draw would have been hurtful, losing from that position is mentally damaging, especially at home. Nunez is sadly kyrptonite for a fairly slow defence like ours.

They have an absolutely elite front three but I disagree on the rest. Their defence is very far from elite, and they played with 10 men for a very long time. VVD is clearly physically declining, Robertson ditto, Joel Matip is very average. Trent is a great footballer but defensively you saw the worst side of him today. They were very vulnerable against Chelsea and Bournemouth, defensively and that was with 11 men.

We were a surprise package last season though, and Bruno’s weird drop off might explain some issues, but the major difference will be teams will play against us differently. We also had ASM, of course debatable for some people, but he is able to break defensive minded teams, and purely having him on the pitch can open up space as teams double him up.

It’s essentially a very athletic team with a lack of guile. It’s a problem for sure.

This just strengthens my campaign to bring back the traditional 10 in the modern era. Get me a slow, flashy guy who has a wand of a left foot to just pick defence splitting passes, and get the rest to do the work around him. Isak will bag 20 plus. Easy.

It’s a very samey midfield for me, it lacks a lot of creativity

We miss willock a lot Imo, but I think we lack a real creative passer

He’s repeatedly caught in posession in the exact same places, the exact same way at the minute. He was good at avoiding pressure, not sure what’s happened

Absolutely 100 percent. This midfield is crying out for someone who can pick a pass like Maddison can.