Matt1892

The club should be speaking with agents to see if a suitable replacement is interested in joining, if the right person can be found then bring them in as soon as possible. I like Howe as a person but he doesn’t have the ability to turn this season around.

Our goals were individual brilliance in an otherwise shit performance.

That was a quality goal by Murphy.

Solanke’s standing foot slipped as he went to shoot and he ended up on the floor.

Since Isak came back from the only long term injury he has had in his career shortly after joining us, he has missed 8 league games out of 48, with one of those being a suspected concussion. Outside of the serious thigh injury he has missed about 13 league games out of just under 170 over the last 5 seasons, with the rest either starting or on the bench.

I think Nketiah has a much higher ceiling than has been demonstrated so far and would be an excellent signing for us if the price was right. The issue though is that Arsenal would want £40 million minimum for him, so all of the risk would be on us.

when you say in form do you mean the ESR of 2001/22? As I don’t think that player exists any more, which is why Arsenal are happy to sell him.

I don’t think he starts over Willock or Joelinton.

I don’t think Smith Rowe would get in our starting eleven if everyone was fit, we are at the stage now where we need quality and not quantity, especially from someone who will be 24 going in to next season.

Their wage bill also went up from £137 million to £194 million.

His reading of the game and movement in the box is high level.

I don’t see us signing four players from abroad for the first team in the same transfer window.

Southgate will still pick Grealish over him sadly.

The view at Turf Moor today.

Willock is our second best midfielder when he is fit and has a run in the team.

Our first home win since the Fulham game before Christmas. Much needed. Hopefully he can build off the back of that and get our season back on track. Results were looking good too until West Ham turned it around.

He has had a few issues with injuries but would be an improvement on Burn in almost every attribute in the left/centre back role.

Kieran Maguire has said Villa are about to post a record loss of £138 million soon, they have already reported this to UEFA. It will be one of the biggest losses of any European team for last year.

Again, it isn’t a simple case of being 7th regarding wage bill so we should be 7th in the league. In the same was a as saying we have the 7th most expensive squad in the league so should be 7th. there are more factors to it than that, which you have agreed with with your example of Man Utd and Brighton.

Edit your original post rather than quoting the same post multiple times.

There are more intricacies to it than purely the wage bill, for example not every players ability is a true reflection of the wage they earn, as well as some players earning more dependent on age, seniority and their status before joining the club, such as arriving on a free transfer etc. I don’t think anyone would argue that Everton have a better squad of players compared to Brighton, due to the latter having the superior scouting network that has allowed them to bring in high quality players at a lower cost, yet by your logic Everton being lower than them is down to manager magic.

The logic that we should settle around where our wage bill is in the league, with anything higher being a manager miracle and anything lower is bad management is nonsense.

We do have a good run in and hopefully we can build some momentum, starting against Wolves. The worry is not that we stutter along until the end of the season, which would be painful enough, but that we go in to free fall and start dropping points on a regular basis. I was critical of the club last summer for not buying for the positions where we lacked quality to take us to the next level, the injuries this season have highlighted much worse like having a back up keeper completely unsuited to our tactics. How this wasn’t picked up in training I don’t know. We are 2 or 3 players from having a top quality team, we just need to play like we believe we are.

The biggest issue at the moment is that there are no signs of turning it around, even after a good display or result we have not been able to build any momentum off the back of it, which is the big worry. Maybe the international break after the Chelsea game will give us a chance to reset, we are stumbling along at the moment and we play like a bottom half Premier League team with no tactics or ideas. If you think back to last season the patterns we put together down the right between Trippier, Bruno and Almiron that pulled the opposition all over the place, these are long gone and instead we play like Man Utd under Ten Hag now, where we appear to have no real game plan on how we are going to open up the opposition. I don’t know what the answer is and I don’t want us to make any rash decision. However, if these inconsistent performances go on until the end of the season then a decision is going to have to be made, as we don’t want to be changing manager midway through the following season. The whole issue with Ashworth resigning complicates the situation even more.