TheEntertainer

I've been very dissapointed all season in Howe, but have been broadly in the 'unhappy but willing to give him more time' camp, because I didn't see who we could bring in who would do any better. It's starting to get to a point where I'd be struggling to think of someone who would do worse... 12th in the league currently. I reckon Bruce could manage this squad to a 12th place finish.

The worst thing about this is I'm not even suprised, we've been poor and mentally weak all season. I never expect us to hold onto a lead, I always expect us to go backwards in the second half. I'm depressed because it's Sunderland doing the double over us, but I'm not annoyed because it's more or less what I expected. I was hoping we could hold on for a point, but never expected us to win today. That's a sad state of affairs versus a newly promoted mid-table team when we're at home.

Man Utd are 100% a bigger club and a more attractive prospect than Newcastle, I think the reason this would be painful though is that given recent history this is a medium step up rather than a massive one that's a no brainer for any player.

It's 100% an embarrassing scoreline, you can't concede 7 and in one game and see it as anything but that and it raises a lot of questions about the heart of the team when the going gets tough which has been a consistent theme this season. There has never been 7 goals scored in the prem by anyone this season and it happened once last season, it's super rare and as such it's embarrassing. The performance in the first leg wasn't embarrassing and was in fact quite the opposite considering the opposition. Both things can be true. Mostly a very good performance, but ultimately an embarrassing scoreline.

Been thinking about the season as a whole and despite the fact it's felt pretty grim at times, it's probably pretty close to a par season for us in current times, you'd expect us to reach the QF of the domestic cups on average (last 8, I know cups are a bit more random than that) so one semi and one 5th round is basically par. You'd expect us to qualify from the group stage of the champions league (given how easy it is to get out of the league now), but then probably go out early in the knockouts which is exactly what we did. You'd expect us to finish 7th or 8th in the league and that's still within reach pretty comfortably, so despite this season feeling pretty horrible at times, I think we've actually done more or less exactly as expected, we just haven't had the over-performances we saw from 2 of the last 3 seasons.

Yeah it's a shame that people are buying the narrative that the 'European Super League' is the only competition worth playing in. I'd 100% take the Conference League, it's fun to play in Europe at any level and you have to earn it even if it's a lower level than the champs so it shows achievement. I'd also love to have a go at winning it. The league cup is generally seen as the lowest tier competition of the 3 in England, doesn't mean I wasn't ecstatic to win it! Seeing additional games in a continental competition as a hassle is bonkers. It's literally what we are playing to try and achieve each season. Obviously the Champions league is preferred but I'd take any and all European football we can get.

And as it's not as strong as the champions league you can rotate a bit more and potentially give some young fringe players some game time

I really like him on co-comms, he always comes across well to me, has the occasional hit with a bit of dry humour and isn't anywhere near as annoying as a lot of the others can be. As someone else mentioned as well he's always good on podcasts, The Rest is Football is really good and he's a big part of that. He can be a bit negative at times, but I like that, he was obviously driven and a very high achiever so it's understandable that he might not like it when he doesn't see the same level of drive or decision making that he had. It's literally his job to comment on things happening so he has to have a bit of an opinion.

It's a minimum of 4, not 4 exactly. I'm absolutely gutted, but blaming the ref isn't right, other than a couple of yellows he didn't give he had a really good game.

Yeah, I'm expecting similar to the group game, a close game that they edge. On the other hand it's a cup game and anything can happen in a one off game so if we take our chances and they don't a defeat isn't a foregone conculsion.

I read into it after posting that and we offered him more base, but you offered him more 'if' you make Champions league, so it's not really us offering more, but it probably does make the decision entirely down to preference rather than money as more garuanteed versus potentially more is probably a close decision.

I do agree, if we just matched the wages offered by the big clubs then we would still lose out on most of the players. For the same reason players want to come to us from teams like Forest and Brentford (which isn't just the wage hike)

Did they? I thought I'd read they offered the player significantly more, I thought the offer to the club was slightly lower, but the wages were a lot higher, I may be misremembering though. There's a world without PSR where we can do what City did on the way up and just massively overpay everyone to get them in over the bigger clubs. I'm not sure that's the best idea and even then some players still wouldn't choose us, but it would definitely give us more pulling power.

I think the PSR point is that we can't compete with the wages the cartel clubs can offer so it's not really a level playing field. I do agree Trafford was always choosing City over us though. In theory us and Chelsea is a bit of a closer choice if we had a bit more financial muscle (as Chelsea have been a bit of a mess over the last couple of years), they are in London though which is probably a plus point over Newcastle.

This is the correct answer RE loans, I'd have loved some loans as well to cover some weak spots, but if no-one wants to loan us their good players then we can't loan anyone. I don't remember anyone being glaringly available at fullback to loan who we just ignored.

I do think there's something in this, we built our success on being up for it more than the opposition week in week out and that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. At some point that's got to be hard to sustain. I also think we need to try and find a way to get that back rather than just accepting people are mentally tired so we're not going to be very good anymore.

Yeah totally agree, just because they are winnable on paper doesn't mean I think we'll win them. I'm still hoping we can turn it around though.

The fixtures coming up don't look too bad if you only look at the league, Man Utd (h) Chelsea (a) Sunderland (h) Crystal Palace (a) 2 hardish games but not impossible, followed by 2 (on paper) easyier games but not bankers. Any other season I'd hope for 6 or 7 points from that.

I think it's been shockingly bad, 30% of the points gained you would expect? I'd not get away with 30% performance in my job! I honestly don't know what the answer is though, although I know it's not Eddie out but there's no way to hide the fact we've been miles below where we should be in the league recently. If we'd been on this form all season we'd finish on 19 points (I appreciate that's not really a fair comparison but it gives you an idea as to how bad we've been recently in the league)

Realistically you would expect 10/12 points from our last 6 games? We've got 3. True you can't expect much against City and Liverpool away, but the rest of the games aren't particularly hard. I'd say that's a reasonable cross section of games in the last 6, 2 very hard, 1 easy and 3 somewhere in the middle.

It's still only 7 points so it's doable, at the current rate of point accumulation though we won't get that many before the end of the season so it's starting to look a stretch.

Not really sure which thread to put this in, but this is a major worry, the only team worse than us in the entire league on form are the absolutely dreadful Spurs (and without their existence we'd be even worse as that's our win), it had felt like we were turning a bit of a corner, but this is super rough reading.

Yeah exactly the same here, I really wanted Ramsdale in and then when he was in he was pretty meh. I think he's probably still just about the best of two not great choices at the minute though, but I'm not sure there's much in it.

Mentality midgets.

Yeah I don't think we'd get that unless someone really wanted him and we dug our heals in, Bayern stopped their bidding at £52.5M and then said we were mental to pay what we did and I don't think his value has gone up this season. I think we'd be mad to try and sell him this summer as we'd lose money and I think there's something there. Maybe I'm wrong and Bayern still want him enough to pay the £55M.