Erikse

What a day.. I thought we were going to be 12th when we were 3-1 down. Then we came back, Chelsea embarrased themselves, Fulham dropped points to Sheffield Utd, Wolves lost, West Ham lost to us and Man Utd didn't manage to beat Brentford. Instead of being 12th we are 8th, 5 pts away from 6th, and 1 point behind 7th with a game in hand. Brighton will probably lose tomorrow aswell.

Sure, but we are facing teams with worse players than what we have available, in nearly every fixture left.

Now I gotta consider him aswell for my fantasy team. Too many solid alternatives right now.

Yeah, I was ready to completely give up.. Looked grim once again. A game like this can give such a boost to the players going forward, hoping we can build on it.

This could be a turning point. Instead of dropping to 12th, we're closing in on 7th.

Gotta admit, I did not expect this. Lets go all the way..

The backline that cabbage head was getting 12th and 13th with was even worse. Like, in about 95% of our games we've fielded a stronger side than what we had under cabbage head. Obviously Howe is just a way better manager, but the players that he has had available are not that terrible. Compare it to Fulham, who will go above us.

Must be the fatigue Travelling is exhausting!

12th here we come

I wonder if that could happen when Trippier is back. I think Livra will go back to the bench though, regardless of his performances today.

When does the yellow card limit change to 15?

Fulham would go above us.. We might drop to 12th today.

Will be hard to replace, but if he doesn't want to stay, then we should definetly sell. Would be awkward to keep him around and have a slow window, and then he doesn't perform like he usually does. If he wants to stay and we don't get a massive offer, then great. As someone said, quality midfielders are really valuable.

Well, if we are going to put their lack of injuries down to playstyle, you can only imagine where they would be with a more demanding playstyle. They have some key players that they look so much worse without. Look at what happened when Paqueta (and Kudus) was out. They had an absolutely awful run of 6 games until he came back. If Howe was managing them Paqueta would've probably been injured for more than 6 games this season, considering the difference in style of play (if that really is the cause of their lack of injuries). Their squad depth is worse than ours.

As I have said before - Man United has their yearly £80 mill flop on £200-300k per week, who gets sold for half the price. No problem, just try again next window. If teams like Leicester does 1 risky failed window, they are in massive trouble. Better stay on the safe side and not take the risks required to get up to the next level.

Yes, they can thanks themselves, absolutely. But it's just a very good example of what restrictions there are in place to prevent clubs from messing with the big boys. It just gets really obvious in Leicesters case when you compare their spending/wages to those that they were competing against for the top 4.

Leicester litterally stopped spending to the point of going from a top 4 candidate to relegation in 2 seasons. Just because of the FFP. They didn't even spend massively prior to that, compared to the other clubs fighting for top 4. I brought it up earlier in a discussion here on FFP how they went from threatening the big clubs to getting relegated because of FFP, and it was a bit of a confusion as to whether it was FFP or just that they couldn't afford to spend anymore. I guess we know now.

In my opinion the manager is not very good, and really overrated. It was they guy that failed pretty hard at Wolves. He did well with Copenhagen ages ago, but has never reached the same heights after that. Some people are under the impression that it's the players who are not good enough, or are saying that we have been unlucky, but I disagree. For example one qualifier when we needed a win against Netherlands in the last game, he set us up to park the bus for 80 min to try to get the winner in the last 10 min. Obviously it failed miserably, as they were prepared for that.. I think we had 1 chance the entire game, and Netherland was happy to just keep the ball all game when we invited them to do so. Under this manager we haven't won a single game against strong opposition. The best being Sweden and Serbia. Just coward tactics whenever we face someone above us in the rankings, and then he tries to paint a picture that we're constanly improving, but also constanly unlucky in the media. The Steve Bruce wheel of excuses. Last qualifier was our worst start to a qualifier in over 20 years (imagine all the shit teams we've had during that time), so it was over for us after like 3 games. It's a shame if we throw away a golden generation just because we ignore the fact that Solbakken hasn't done anything in like 10 years.

Look at what he was replying to, and what he replied. My own reply was based on that. Depends what you mean by "based on nothing" I suppose..

It's based common sense from having a historicly bad injury record throughout the entire season. It would be incredibly naive to suggest that it's all just bad luck. Why was this injury not surprising at all?

I agree. And this particular one might still just be unlucky. We don't know which ones that are down to bad luck or something we could've prevented. But I can't see a scenario where we get this absurd amount of injuries if we just "did what we had to do" all the way. So in the grand scheme of things, I'd say that there must be something seriously wrong in terms of our injury prevention, and I hope they figure out how to improve on it.

I mean, I believe you, but did they really tell you all this without even telling you whether the injury was related, which is kind of the main part, and is the one thing that will definetly be known to everyone anyways? I guess we know now from the Botman post.

We won't buy 2x CBs, we will have to heavily prioritize again, as allways. Players are expensive, and several positions needs strengthening.

What plans? Altering the plans of doing nothing

Lets hope we can field 11 players for the first game of the season.