ffs

i'm not sure i can understand it either tbh - but i do still feel it. in the final analysis, i hate the cartel more than i hate sunderland. i am now realising.

This is the sane and healthy perspective.

hmmmm colour me at least slightly mental in that case don't get me wrong, i was *disgusted* by our abject surrender to mackems home + away - who wasn't? and i'd much rather finish above them but i just bone deep *hate* the cartelisation, and seeing one of them sunk would give me such pleasure, very slightly right a huge wrong at least slightly mental...

I now feel more confident we're gonna win this comfortably than for literally any other match this season

I now think that ironically enough Howe would be absolutely brilliantly suited to a club where he had no input on transfers at all. Like, I think if he went to Brighton, was given a bunch of talented technical players from all over the place, he would quite possibly thrive improving them and putting them together. He might be a better manager if he was nowhere near the buying and selling - which I'm sure he thinks he'd hate, and would maybe be a deal-breaker for him. But I do still think it.

yeah you may be right. not sure. whole thing makes me twitchy

I do like rocket power🚀 But I don't like the new "super stadiums". At least, none of the ones I've been to (spurs, arsenal, wembley, maybe that's it). Soulless *as fuck* and being sold to all the time. Really like a big mall with a match happening in it. No thanks.

Same, but for me it's not the stands so much as the location. The exact situation. And I might change my mind, maybe - but I so hate that psr etc is making clubs jettison all the things that make them distinctive and special. And for me that includes SJP being right where it is. I may be an extremist on this tho. Like, if I was an arsenal fan then I wouldn't think arsenal should have left highbury, even if it meant less on field success. At least, I think that's what I'd think.

Also, and while we're here - I want to stay at SJP even if it handicaps us for PSR relative to a new stadium. I just kindof realised that this season for some reason. It's fucking *SJP*, lads. Irreplaceable.

As usual I don't really know what I think about Eddie (nobody's gonna listen to *my* podcast 🙂). Certainly nothing original. But if it is actually true that he's staying then I feel OK about that and there certainly seems a decent chance that he can get us back on track. There have been a bunch of negatives about this season that seem reversible or improvable. And others that are maybe more long-term baked in and concerning. Quite hard to figure out which is which. One thing I find myself doing is thinking that a replacement manager would do none of the things that Eddie gets wrong, and also no new wrong things of his own! Whereas of course every manager has blind spots, weaknesses, foibles. And I guess one thing that we do know about Eddie is that the weaknesses he does have, if he can be clear eyed about seeing and accepting them (which is hard for any of us), he will work to improve. He does seem to have leant too heavily on the prem for recruitment recently, which has been particularly bad as we can't actually get any of our top prem targets. But maybe Ross Wilson can sort that. He does seem to have been tactically inflexible at times and wasn't as brilliant as me in seeing great (and pre 60th minute!) opportunities for game-changing substitutions. But he has also delivered some tactical masterclasses over the years. And it does seem that there's been something a bit off in the camp this season, post rat, all the wolt+ wissa weirdness, mentality midgets. But that in particular seems likely to be temporary. Some and maybe even most owners would have sacked Howe this season. For whatever combination of reasons ours seem not to be going to. That doesn't seem an obviously wrong decision (and we have had managers where every day we didn't sack them seemed an obvious mistake). So I guess I'm at: fair enough? A scintillating read as ever from me! 😂

what if he said "i could feel my groin was iffy as fuck so i did a go slow after the league cup final so it didn't pop and then did literally everything i could to get out of Newcastle United, the club i adore, so that when my groin blew somebody else would be left carrying the can and the mags would have £125 million in the bank. it's been agony carrying this secret and being hated by the Newcastle fans, but I'd do it all again for the good of the club."

while i think i'd also prefer man city, largely because of that "ees a deesgrace" interview - and because arsenal fans are a bit ugh whereas i always feel like most city fans were around for the dross years and totally get that they've won the lottery, hence less entitled - fundamentally i don't really care and any feelings i have about it won't last longer than a few hours. (whereas something involving *us* would stick with me forever, of course. i bet none of us who were there is even slightly over 95/96 or ever will be). so i think i'm in the who cares camp really. which must be why i find myself posting about it at 11.30pm on a monday. you're welcome, everybody 🙂

Those sandwiches both sound pretty good tbf 🙂 I hear you. I'd *much* rather Spurs go down too, of course - as well as the sheer visceral delight of it (and that stupid stadium hosting champo clubs would be hilarious), it feels like maybe it would deal a blow to any future ESL type schemes that anyone's cooking up. The little bit of copium that I'm smoking is that while spurs would be straight back up as champions, i wonder whether maybe west ham would struggle a bit more in the champ, might even not get promoted first season, collapse of the porn twats - undeniably hilarious. and also another white elephant of a stadium hosting lincoln et al. it maybe the spam + marge on warburtons option - but i don't totally hate that option.

pardewesque

he doesn't even accept some of the players he *did* want

i like that you included a TLDR after a short para and i didn't after a way overlong barely punctuated scrawl 🙂 i think the big difference betw villa and us was the starting point in terms of player quality and value. it made psr a bit less horrific for them - but it will still constrain them as intended it may also be that emery is a better manager than Eddie in some important respects. just like those managers who are end of season avoid-relegation specialists (until they aren't), maybe Eddie is a master of outperforming being underestimated. but when other teams stop underestimating us, he doesn't have the same ability to outperform. for me, though, i'm not even sure it's possible to overblame psr. it doesn't mean that Eddie/the team/we shouldn't have done better this season - we 100% definitely should. but psr is the underlying factor behind our inability to kick on, take the next step, become truly elite. and i guess my point is that whoever we bring in (if we bring anyone in) - mourinho, mancini, simeone, some clever up and comer - they will all be swimming in pyjamas carrying that same rubber brick.

this whole thread has been amazingly civil given how numbingly bad the football has been (so we all feel ugh) and how emotive the subject is. i don't even feel like people are that far apart. everyone's concerned about current performances - how could you not be? and at the same time everyone recognises that Eddie has done some truly great things with us. whether you end up at 60:40 or 40:60 from that is almost random, and wherever you end up, at this point you can see the other side's pov. that second half in barcelona seems to have done a lot of damage to the players' mentality. which i think the rat stuff had already had an effect on. all the players can see that "the project" has been psr-ed out of viability. we just can't pay high enuf wages for the top top players - by design. and now any existing or prospective player can see that. our existing players see top top players turning us down, just as much as we do. and yet perhaps they were still thinking hey we're in the champs' league round of 16, maybe we actually *can* be, are on the way to being, a real elite club. and then just a total humiliating abject surrender against a truly elite club - and suddenly nobody can sustain the illusion anymore. i don't even know what i think about Eddie. as many have said it's the nature of the performances, and his sometimes Amorimesque same shit different day inflexibility, that give as much concern as the results. and many many managers would have done well for us given the money spent. that said, he is the world's most decent bloke (nobody in here has said otherwise), did a truly incredible job in those first two seasons, *won us a cup*, and had us playing some joyous football at points. but Eddie or no Eddie we are all, players included, awake to the new reality now, i think. we are being deliberately prevented from paying top top players the wages they command, and until that changes we *cannot* join the real elite, whatever david hopkinson says. how could we? our reality seems more likely to be a sort of cuck club on steroids. a brighton or brentford with deeper pockets but worse analytics (no disrespect to the new fella). i feel like we have overachieved in getting champs' league twice - some of which was Eddie, but also some of which was being in a period of time when incoming players could credibly be sold "the project" of being the next man city or whatever - and now they can't. Eddie seems exhausted and the team looks at a real low. maybe he should go, maybe he shouldn't. but if he does then whoever comes in is going to be in the exact same bind. we aren't allowed to pay top wages, and every agent and player in the world knows it. we could literally get pep, but he wouldn't be allowed to *be* pep. and i truly hate that this is our reality - it's like we got out of actual ashley and the cartel imposed a systematic ashley on us.

i'm not big on karma, but the two players who went on strike each currently being candidates for the worst ever signing by their clubs does feel like something.

it's probably been mentioned several times already in this enormous thread, but i wonder whether his pneumonia hospitalisation a year ago has had some lingering impact, somehow. his ppg and win ratio are starkly different before and after. probably just a coincidence, and he's super fit and so on, but if *I* had nearly died and been hospitalised i feel like i probably wouldn't be quite at my normal level for a good stretch.

If it's any consolation if the result in that game had been different then so would have been the entirety of subsequent events, so none of our or anyone else's matches would necessarily have had the results that they did. We'd be in a completely different reality.

Keeper came off at half time then. Fake injury iirc

He was the only one of our subs who wasn't warming up on the pitch at half time. Which made me think oh maybe Eddie's gonna surprise Barca by bringing him on at half time. The whole Wissa situation is a bit odd tbh. I guess we'll find out what's really been going on in the fullness of time.

Agree. Not quite as obvious as the need to sub Burn at Brentford but close. Joelinton on for Woltemade at HT would've made such a difference.

I mean, we all know this, but now it's apparent to everyone (particularly players) that we aren't allowed to pay anything close to top-level wages, and that consequently there can't be anything like "the project" that was sold to incoming players soon after the takeover - we're a bit adrift in terms of identity. We just can't get or keep most of the players we want, which would drive our identity. If we were allowed to pay players the top-level wages that we can easily afford then we'd still probably have the rat, plus some of Ekitike, Guehi, João Pedro, Cunha, Mbuemo etc etc etc. and a deeeeep squad. Just like Chelsea and then City did when clubs were allowed to pay whatever wages they wanted to. Without that we struggle for an identity because we're forced to buy players that are far from the top of our list, and so don't really fit any identity and aren't quite top top players. Hence this driiiift. Combine that with very little training time because of all these games, and a shallow squad because we're deliberately constrained from having a deeper one, and we can't cobble together much of an identity with even the players we've managed to assemble. We'll do better next season with no Europe, but I do feel like we're going to continue to struggle to attract the absolutely elite players that we need both to take the big step up and also to get a new and improved identity. It kills me to see city just casually sign semenyo, Guehi etc etc etc and commentators fawn over how incredible the squad is that pep's built without ever even once reflecting on the fact that almost no other clubs are permitted to pay the wages necessary to attract those players - so of course city have fucking hoovered them up. I do increasingly think that if we're really serious about challenging at the very top then the challenging that we need to be doing now is regulatory. This "well build up your revenues like good little boys and eventually the doors will open" stuff is obviously bad faith and wrong. A club that can't pay for the best players will never be able to match the revenues of a club that can - and doubly so when we are starting so far behind. I dreeeaamm of the days when we could announce an exciting properly top player having signed, which we did many times back in the day. Now we simply cannot do that - we're not allowed to pay the wages required. Anyway, sorry to ramble but our missing identity is imo a direct result of not being allowed to pay the wages of elite players. Which, is disgusting.

I hear you, but I am *so* bothered about the cartelisation of the premier league, and in particular its impact on us, that anything that happens to undermine it or hopefully over time blow it up, is a source of absolute joy.