Ellis H

The point we got off Palace looking a good one now. They’re doing really well against the top 10.

Not sure what he did but it’s officially 5 yellow cards so he’s definitely out. “His suspension leaves Town with only one recognised striker for next week's Newcastle clash - Ali Al-Hamadi, who was playing in League Two at the start of 2024.”

You’re right. Just looked and would never have guessed he’d played that much.

https://www.nufc.com/html/2020-21html/2020-12-22brentford-a.html Almost exactly 4 years ago. It’s easy to moan about things now but never forget what it was like. Some good Bruce quotes in there for the connoisseurs.

They drew 2-2 last week with Brighton tbf. Maybe we made them look bad?

Yeah, I was thinking about those reliable, fringe type players like Watson, Sellars, Fox, Gillespie etc. He’ll be on stage at the Tyne Theatre in 30 years telling stories about this period.

Assuming a similar trajectory, Osula will be Isak’s replacement next season.

One of the key things I love about him is that he wants to win 5-0 every game. Other managers say that then prove otherwise but he dreams of it every night. Give him the right tools and he could do (or continue to do) something really special with us.

Indeed. Funny thing about him is that he’d be loved by us in the early to mid-90’s teams. Extremely likeable, works really hard and can score and assist when called upon. Now he’s treated as something we must suffer through.

Every injury will just make it all the more annoying when he signs for West Ham next season and plays 30+ games.

“As Starmer landed in the region, a Manchester-based company that specialises in the material graphene announced a new deal with the Saudis to use its product in a major construction project. The deal with Graphene Innovation Manchester aims to generate £250m of investment and research in Greater Manchester, and could generate more than a thousand skilled jobs.” The North and the North East are very different to Southerners.

This is the lineup for the next Tottenham manager. You’d assume we’d be fishing in the same stream these days unless Mitchell has other ideas. Pochettino and Mourinho wouldn’t be anywhere near as long for us obviously. Brendan Rodgers 5/2 Erik Ten Hag 8/1 Thomas Frank 8/1 Graham Potter 10/1 Gareth Southgate 12/1 Marco Silva 12/1 Andoni Iraola 14/1 Kieran McKenna 14/1 Michael Carrick 14/1 Roberto De Zerbi 14/1 Xavi 14/1 Diego Simeone 16/1 Eddie Howe 16/1 Julian Nagelsmann 16/1 Max Allegri 18/1 Maurizio Sarri 20/1 Michel 20/1 Lee Carsley 22/1 David Moyes 25/1 Mauricio Pochettino 25/1 Unai Emery 33/1 Jose Mourinho 100/1 Antonio Conte 250/1

“Ratcliffe was always going to have to make unpopular decisions but it has come at the cost of staff morale and now supporters are brazenly branding him a “c**t” https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/sport/football/saw-dan-ashworth-escorted-out-30538942

That was last season. We’re currently 5 points off 5/6th which is fine in December. Long term? We’ll see.

8 points off 4th, an FA Cup final away from Europe and averaging 2.5 goals a game is near miraculous considering the circumstances. How spoiled are we that it’s considered underachieving?

They need to have a proper, realistic plan in place if they’re pulling the plug. Change for the sake of change could set us back a few years and undo most of Howe’s good work. Forwards not sideways.

This was probably the same reasoning why we got Howe tbf. We need to aim higher than this if we’re rolling the dice.

Barnes showing up well with that goal. Not sure Gordon scores that tbh.

That basically just puts all of the goal threat on Isak. Barnes could win us this game.

This is why selling Barnes isn’t as easy or obvious as some are assuming. Who would be playing today instead? Almiron?

For all they concede, their keeper has also made the most saves by far this season.

I’m not keen on Semenyo either. It’s very simplistic but he's got 17 attacking returns in the league since the start of last season while Murphy has got 13 in about half the time.

It’s not the international players that are the problem. It’s the 10 players who are hangovers from the Bruce era that were in the squad yesterday. Yes, 10 (unless I’ve counted wrong). If those players were consistently top 4/6 challenging quality they’d have had far better offers than us when they signed. It’s what he also did at Bournemouth, bringing a load of lower league players into the PL and making them competitive year after year.

Considering we’ve only got 3 genuinely good finishers in the squad (2 of which barely play) and a real lack of creativity it’s amazing we score so many goals. I think we averaged about 2.5 a game last year in all competitions. Really does keep coming back to Howe getting far more out of a lot of these players than we could expect and we should remember that when people are sticking the knife in after a poor performance.

At least half our squad isn’t good enough for regular top 4/6 tbf. Plenty of bottom half Bruce-era players still remain and are playing well above themselves and have been since Howe turned up. They’ll be filtered out over time if we can actually spend the money we have.