Erikse

I think there was a bit of a new manager effect in the beginning.

Yeah, I think it was this exact time last year where the injuries started to ramp up, and we lost twice to Dortmund. At the time we were in a better position in the league than what Villa is now, I think.

Their shit run even started earlier than ours. They could be in for a pretty disappointing season. They haven't had that many injuries yet, but december will be brutal.

Not being able to bring in Pedro was allways going to terrorize me, wasn't it? I guess I'll regret more and more each round.

Knew it would turn around after those first few games. I wonder what excuses he has in his locker now. He's had some time to think out some new ones in his time off. Is it still the fans, the players and the media?

Ødegaard starts for Arsenal. Shock. Not.

Wood on the bench, I guess they want someone quicker for counters? I remember Wood destroying us on the counter last season, though. Maybe that was just completely out of the ordinary.

I think the media has some blame in that. Fans trying to turn him into a villain also won't make him more comfortable. Sure, he shouldn't really care about it all, but I don't he's really letting it affect his work. I can agree that maybe he could've done some things different in that first interview to calm down some of the noise, though.

What was weird in those quotes? The only thing I can see someone finding weird was the joke he made, but not everyone will like the same joke.

Sounds promising to me, even gives credit to the work that was done before him. Pints for PSR was just a small joke here. I thought it was funny tbh, maybe that's just me.

At the time the treatment methods probably still wasn't as good as today, which makes it even worse.

As Howe talks about relating to injuries, he keeps repeating that we need to learn from the past. The injury problems last season was seen by many as sheer bad luck and we were forced into do everything we did, but Howe clearly feels like they could've done something differently, even when every decision had a reasonable explanation. Where I'm going with this is that we can look back at players like Almiron, Trippier and Wilson, and think about how selling them not so long after their last good spell would potensially have been great. Maybe the club wanted to, and there were no good enough bids, and in that case there club wasn't really at fault. But it's atleast something to think about, especially if they were fixated on someone having had a good patch, and expected it to come back. An important context here being that all of them are past 30, so a sudden drop off isn't uncommon. You'd think that we'd have a mindset of "what will probably happen tomorrow?" rather than "what happened yesterday?". I understand that it's hard to identify when someone has a high chance of dropping off the next season, but I think it's possible. The 18 goal season for Wilson was highly unusual for him, it was unlikely for him to avoid injury problems for another season. The biggest issue would probably be to afford a replacement as we wouldn't have gotten that much for any of those. That's where we need a good scouting network.

Well, if they were truly trying to get even more for him, that means we were miles of each other. Strange how we kept trying then. Maybe they wanted to make the price seem that high for other potensial bidders.

Need to be a bit more proactive sometimes, rather than clinging onto someone because they had a good spell. Some players may have been difficult to sell, but with Wilson I think there would have been interest last year.

According to @Wallsendmag he got injured in training yesterday.

Krafth, but he is also 30.

I know a lawyer. He supports Ipswich though, so not sure he will be bothered enough.

I start laughing everytime I see the words "project big picture". Ah yeah silly us, we're only against it because we're just not seeing the bigger picture!

Bet he has seen him play no more than 3 times at best, and is jumping to conclusions based on that.

Which makes narratives such as the banner Palace fans was showing so much more ridiculous, as if Premier League was welcoming Saudi and their money to the Premier League with open arms. Obviously the Premier League hated the takeover even before it happened, but they were forced to accept it in the end.

And if they hadn't resolved issues and accepted the takeover at the time, they would've risked being forced to show these things to the public? Or am I wrong?

Joelinton has done very well at LW lately, after struggling at CM. Honestly I still believe LW has been his best position ever since Howe came in. There are a few things that makes him a little less suited centrally, but ofcourse at times he has done a job for us there aswell.

Didn't Ashley and the Saudis push for PL to release e-mails and/or documents related to the whole "fit and proper" saga right before they gave in and approved it? I remember something really shady like this. Since it got approved, they weren't pressured into releasing the mail/documents anymore. Maybe my memory is bad here, but I remember thinking at the time that we made the takeover happen by trying to force them to reveal something that they absolutely didn't want to, so they would rather let it happen at that point.

Just realised that Brentford are top of the home table, while having 0 points away from home.. Their fixtures did contribute a lot to this effect, mind.