Erikse

Me too, but many were too busy telling me how many assists he had in 2023. Those 2023 assists really came in handy this year!

Pretty decent. Who did you cap? My entire GW was destroyed by my decision to just wait 1 more GW to bring in Saka.. Not sure about Ait Nouri yet, they're using him as a CB in the worst defence in the league by far.

He was actually injured for a large part of that run in. Even Bruno didn't play until the final few games. It was just Burn and Targett who came in to play regularly during that massive winning streak after january, and our defence was just so shit before that, so Targett and Burn looked like massive upgrades. Wood came in aswell, and he also mattered due to the complete lack of options upfront. We would be nowhere near 4th the following season without Tripps, mind..

Ait Nouri feels kind of like Lewis. Never clean sheet, doesn't get the attacking returns atm... Are they playing him at CB? Seems odd to me.

Not enough depth = lack of rotation. We had more lack of depth due to injuries, but still fielded a strong starting 11 in many games. It was the fatigue (increased by the injuries) that killed us, and fatigue has a huge impact on Villa aswell. Our key players were completely out of energy from the 60th min, I'd imagine that Villa is experiencing something similar. They went all out vs Juve midweek.

They chose Badiashile vs Villa, but should atleast be getting more minutes, yes.

173 minutes in the league so far..

I didn't have Haaland, I was just 0.2 short of swapping Son into Saka, and didn't want to take a hit. Ofcourse Saka has the gw of his life..

City will probably start picking up points from now with the easier fixtures. Probably not like winning every game as they used to, but it's unthinkable that they keep going like this much longer.

Honestly thinking about it, it won't happen in january. And that would be a bad time to do it anyways. Who depends on the actual bids and what replacements that are available to us in the market.

If the reports about january is true, it seems like we have to. Better than doing nothing imo. We need more balance.

Scores a goal per game for Norway, and was the Champions League top scorer when he was at Dortmund. City are just screwed in every way atm.

What happened to mr. humble?

Didn't that guy manage to piss off Andrew Tate with an inappropriate comment on him converting to Islam, and then he had to make shitty apology videos etc?

If Man City lose it will be 0-1-6 in the last 7?

Must be one of the most expensive benches in PL history (bar Chelsea) in terms of transfer fee. You've got 2 ~£100m signings, alongside some other expensive ones aswell. Chelsea has probably beaten this many times though, with Enzo and Caicedo.

In other words, you don't have him on FPL?

Seems like we would need to sell someone valuable for that to happen, unfortunately. If we've maxed out our credit card, then excellent recruitment won't be an option.

Which is also crazy considering how much strain he was put under last season vs this. Might be a hangover from that, mind..

When I see comments about our squad not being good enough, I start thinking about the squads that Burce finished 12th and 13th with.. Our squad is miles and miles better than that, and Bruce was a terrible manager. Ofcourse we can expect way more from the current squad of players, like I don't exactly feel sorry for Howe for having to work with decent PL players like Longstaff and the Joes when he also has Isak, Bruno, Tonali, Gordon etc. at his disposal.

I look at the next 7 games and I fear 5 of them. We won't lose all those 5, but we really need to step up sooner rather than later.

Basically if you your opinion that 19 in 13 is a good or acceptable score, that means that your standard is that 55 points is a good or acceptable end result. My expectation for this squad without Europe is a little higher than that.

No I am saying that we need to step up our game and take more than 1.46 points per game, because that is only good enough for ~9th come end of the season. Us being x amount of points behind someone doesn't change our results. Let me get this straight - we are evaluating our own points and results up until now, right? 3rd place come end of season will 100% have more than 67 points. That's the only reason I brought that up. What we, a specific team, are going to do is more guesswork, and doesn't matter in terms of evaluating our results or points so far.

The only reason we're 4 points off third is because the current 3rd place is on course for 67 points. We've not had a 3rd place finish as low as 67 points since 19/20, so it's a fluke, and someone is going probably to pull away eventually. The more teams in the mix, the more likely it is for some of them to go on a proper streak. If we are going to judge our points, as mentioned, it's all about how many points we have on average and look at what that average usually gives come end of season. Talking about 4 points off 3rd it doesn't really evaluate our points that much, but rather the unusually low score of the 3rd place, which will change over time.

Tbh if he keeps getting injured like this, letting him go would for a hefty fee wouldn't be the worst thing ever. The problem is finding a replacement, and that's going to be very tricky.