Ellis H

“[James Benge] Al-Nassr already readying second and final offer worth up to £90 million for Kaoru Mitoma. Brighton are reluctant to sell.“ Insane.

In most cases, It’s no longer about how much a player is worth but about how much a team can afford. It’s unrealistic to say Longstaff is worth roughly the same as Almiron but almost all clubs are spending pennies and not pounds.

As unwatchable as Man Utd are, Onana is playing so you can’t look away.

Looking at the current table we just need Forest and Bournemouth to naturally regress and Villa to struggle due to their extra games and that leaves us top 5. It’s only Liverpool, Arsenal, Man City and Chelsea after that.

Scary thing about Cole is he only scored a couple of penalties for us. He’d have scored loads more if Beardsley wasn’t so good at them.

Only Robinson, Saka and Salah have more assists in the league. Also more than a certain Bruno Fernandes.

He’ll be in tears by the 6th minute.

Thank god for PSR.

Whatever money we make from the Almiron sale, including saved wages, need to go towards a new contract. Absolute priority number one now.

As bad as he is, selling him and not replacing him makes the squad smaller when it’s already tiny. That becomes Howe’s problem when it’s actually a recruitment problem.

It’s possible that he might not want Almiron to leave because a lengthy Murphy injury with no Almiron leaves us with no real RW for 4 months. Put simply, he’s better than nothing and that goes for a few squad players who should also be on the chopping block. I’m sure Howe would be happy for Almiron and others to leave if he was confident they’d be upgraded but there’s no guarantee there since the £50+million we had to spend in the summer has disappeared.

Feels like massive nitpicking but they went out the league cup in August while we’ve been playing in it up to last week. No real need for “excuses” though, they were just the better team on the day.

It isn’t like it was under Pardew, Bruce etc where a new signing would start at 7/10 for talent and quickly become a 5/10 at best so we had to be a lot more careful. It’s often the opposite under Howe so we should really be putting faith in him doing that with some calculated gambles. It might just be the difference between Champions League or not.

Got beat fair and square by a good team who are now 6 points off second heading into February. Win against Southampton next week and we’re back on track.

He’s passed the audition.

With the current rules, overachieving is the new improving. Luckily we’ve got a manager who specialises in overachieving.

He’s going at the right time tbh. If Murphy was to get injured now and Almiron had to play the next 4 months he’d be hated by the end of it. Murphy has raised the bar significantly and we’d be a much worse team with Almiron.

No intended hate towards Almiron but the more Murphy plays the worse Almiron looks in hindsight. It feels like Murphy offers more offensively in 1 game than Almiron does/did in 20. Overall, It’s likely Howe has just told him to keep it simple and try to find Isak whenever possible. It was him who passed it to Isak for the first goal tonight but probably won’t get the assist.

Keegan took us from much further down to much higher up so that’ll take some beating but it’s definitely achievable in the next few years for Howe.

Easy to forget Beardsley was in his 30’s when he was here the second time. I think he averaged a goal every 4 games on top of seemingly countless assists.

If he stays till he retires he’ll demolish Shearer’s record. He’s about 1/4 of the way there after 90 games and we as a club/team are only getting better.

He’s getting the protection he wasn’t getting a year ago. This is probably us at our best defensively.

Shades of Fabrice Pancrate with that one. Just noticed the Wikipedia entry for that goal is rather informal “He scored his first goal on 5 December 2009, after producing an impressive bit of skill, before mullering the ball in off the crossbar, in a 2–0 home victory over Watford, after coming on as a substitute.”

I thought he was sat up at one point but I was trying not to watch tbh.

Bromley, Wolves, Bournemouth, Southampton and Fulham up next with only Southampton being away. Could realistically win all of them.