Ellis H

It’s crazy that we’ve won 14 of the last 19 (in the league since Brentford) and it’s still nowhere near being wrapped up. Just shows how good/consistent we’d need to be to actually win the league.

Allegiances aside, would you rather go to Man Utd and start 95% of games or come here and play in 95% of games. It’s easy to look at the negatives and think he won’t join because he’ll not start every game but what about the positives? He’ll be coming into a trophy winning, (probably) champions league club with a really good young team who are managed by one of the best in the world. The manager plays extremely striker friendly football and he can be a big part in our almost guaranteed future success. The ultimate bottom line here is that if we want to go to the top we’ll need to start convincing good players to join even if they won’t start every game, because that’s what the bigger clubs do. We need as good a squad as possible if we’re in Europe and attacking the domestic cups every year, so deliberately buying dedicated “back ups” won’t help.

Got to bear in mind that any signing will be pre-Howe in terms of their development. Delap isn’t the finished article but he’s playing in a team that got relegated in November. We won’t know how good he really is until he’s been here a year.

Today’s goal moves Hojlund level with Schar for league goals this season. Same amount of assists.

The officials setting up goals like peak Murphy here.

A few “I don’t want to go to sleep” stats. 24/25 - 85 goals, 1.9 per game. 23/24 -102 goals, 2 per game. 1.75 goals per game over his whole time here. (Keegan 1st time - 1.85 Pardew - 1.2 Bruce - 1.1)

“Tindall was involved in a verbal exchange with the fourth official and shown the yellow card during the 3-0 win over Ipswich Town.” that’s from the Chronicle and the BBC live feed thing said similar.

Take it for what it’s worth but Isak’s xG today was 1.53, his joint highest this season with the last Ipswich game where he scored a hattrick. Even taking away the penalty it’s about 0.75. For context Burn was 0.47 and Bruno was 0.29.

By “at times” I meant during games but 3 of his 7 goals in the last 3 months have been penalties, with only 1 assist. He was electric until the Southampton game then not so much since. Just reinforces the need for a proper second striker so he can have a rest.

Not a massive problem if others are contributing but Isak doesn’t half go missing at times. 19 goals in the last 5 and he’s got 2? 1 being a penalty.

Assist and assisted the assist. Lionel Murphy can’t be stopped.

Shearer-esque header.

We’ve really missed them along the floor through balls he does. They almost always lead to a cross from someone.

“Just tell us you could have died ffs!” is very much the vibe of the press conference unsurprisingly.

“Stingy Jim Ratcliffe's desperate cost-cutting measures at Manchester United continue to reach new lows. Not content with hundreds of redundancies, raising ticket prices and scrutinising every club purchase, from vegetables to sellotape, now he's come, at long last, for the freebies. Charities linked to the club, who previously received free tickets to home matches, were informed by email yesterday that the Man Utd Foundation would no longer be covering the expense. Given that charity tickets are rather limited in the first place, it's a particularly Scrooge move, even for Sir Jim.”