Ed Vinegar

Decent with his feet but fairly poor at all other aspects of goalkeeping. No hard feelings but this is the right decision.

We lost 17 league games and finished far below a newly promoted Sunderland team composed of random £15m-£20m signings and championship cloggers. We never put together a single run of good form. We've spent the last 3 months arguing about whether our manager or players or "mitigating circumstances" are to blame. Being a newly promoted team is the ultimate mitigating circumstance and we finished way below one and one point better than another. Osula's goal to beat man u plus the 4-3 against Leeds were pretty good though. 2.5/10

We've lost 17 games this season, joint worst among sides that didn't get relegated. Didn't watch this one as I was lying in the park enjoying the glorious sunshine. Sounds like I made a good choice.

Very likeable player. Thinking about his first goal yesterday: it's not an amazing finish or anything but it feels like none of our strikers have been regularly putting that type of chance away this season. Not that he has either! But it's promising. We should keep him and make sure he gets playing time, unless some worldie striker falls into our lap.

Given for handball according to BBC sport website.

I actually can't believe that was given. They were desperate to give a penalty. The ref looks like he's about to explode with glee when he does his stupid little gesture. Fucks sake man.

That is a fucking sickener man. What the fuck. Cheating cunts.

Watched the past two hearts games with my Jambo mate and his dad (who still isn't fully recovered from 1986). I'd love them to win it!

For people saying he needs to rebuild this summer and start well next season - how well does he need to do and how long would you give him? If he heads up a rebuild and we give him effectively a 12 game probation next season... Is that a good plan? Would he want that? I don't know either way, just thinking about it. If we're making the decision based on start of next season, what's the cutoff point?

I don't think we could go down. I think it'll be Spurs because West Ham are in form. But we could very well end up finishing below two of the promoted teams and uncomfortably close to 18th.

The man is a liability now. He does something mad like that every ten games or so.

I still want him to stay but I'm beginning to worry it's wishful thinking from me. If he stays the summer and starts next season like this then he'll get sacked imo. So we should keep him only if we have real confidence he can turn it around. He has turned around from poor seasons and done well. But if we do sack him mid season, we'll have a worse set of choices. And we'll be bringing in someone new to use a squad Howe built. It's a big risk whatever we do at this point. Dispassionately, if there's a standout choice available in the summer and Eddie has shown little in the remainder of this season, I think it would be sensible to replace him. At the end of the day I do think he's a good manager, and I respect him and think he has earned another chance. But I can understand those who think another chance requires some signs of change first. It's all pretty miserable.

This is all really hard to explain. What are we doing? It's difficult to pick out anything to be hopeful about or any sign that things might change. How many times can we do this in a season? The season now is a pure write-off. We're not getting into Europe so how do we start a rebuild from here?

Oooooof. Poor Wales. Johnson not beating the 'being shite' allegations

Heard Robbie Earnshaws peculiar accent on the Wales commentary just now, wiki'd him and learned he's the only player ever to score a hat trick in the top 4 divisions of English football, the FA cup, the league cup and in an international match. Quite a record for someone I don't remember being that prolific.

When I looked at their run in, I thought this was the match that would confirm whether relegation was a real risk or not. Losing it means it is. They don't have the hardest run-in conceivable but the easiest game they have left is Wolves away and... you wouldn't bank on them winning it. Sunderland and Brighton next, both might think they're in the running for Europe. Then Wolves, already gone but with some newfound spirit. Then Villa away, tough match. Then Leeds - possibly second best chance at some points. Then Chelsea and Everton both of whom will be chasing European spots. West Ham have a similar run in, spurs play one extra away game. It's tough to call but if West ham beat wolves at home on 10 April and spurs lose to Sunderland...

This is a bad result on top of a bad season, that's why people are reacting. A bad season is acceptable and there are mitigating circumstances. But I'm not sure they're all that convincing... Sunderland got promoted last season which is the mother of all mitigating circumstances. I think Howe's problem right now is that we look shite, Sunderland did the double over us, he's at the peak of his influence over us (tactics, training, recruitment) AND we've got a nightmare summer coming up in which the squad needs a big overhaul and we'll be forced to let go of some of our best players. A bad season is forgiveable, but do people trust him to put things right in the summer?

A pathetic second half display. Not hard done by, no excuses. We just weren't good enough.

Disappointing. Assume we were exhausted otherwise the only thing that can explain the difference between the first and second half is that Eddie's been reading about the benefits of micro dosing general anaesthetic.

He's played himself into being a selection headache, looks hard to drop. If all our midfielders are ever fit at the same time we will have a lot of flexibility. Anyway he's been in excellent form for a good stretch of games now, very pleased to see it!

Has Gordon ever missed a pen for us? Certainly hasn't for a while, I'm fine with him being selfish given his record.

Wow! Literally just said wow out loud in my living room there. Awesome.

This is the bit that seems craziest to me. He obviously thought 'there's no way I can convince the ref I was outside the box so I'll have to say my arm was in a natural position' and then the ref gives the handball as a free kick outside the box. He must have been as confused as anyone.

If we're comparing to Murphy, the other key difference seems to be resilience. Murphy will fuck up 9 times and then do something great on attempt 10, but Elanga at the moment seems to visibly shrink after his first error. The weird thing is that currently every player in the team apart from Miley is making loads of errors each game, but it seems to get to Elanga much more (surely not helped by getting pelters from the crowd).

Whatever else, the team has shown great mental strength in the past two games. In both they could easily have crumbled but had the force of will to recover and get the results (however tight they were!) Obviously a bit of my reaction is the fact that we won them, but I do think it's encouraging. We didn't give up and I'm happy about that.