Clappers not content with their **** team winning in **** fashion once again. Needing to pick fights to fill the empty void in their souls that their horrific team would never fill.
There were three teams in the league who picked up 6 points from their last two games: Norwich, Barnsley and us. We’ve secured our first away win in months. And the mood here is uniformly negative. There are a lot of underlying issues and injuries hampering us but we’re still grinding our points. It may or may not end up coming together, but we’re still in the mix for automatic promotion or even to win the league and that’s all one can hope for at this stage. Norwich aren’t exactly blowing teams away. Bournemouth have done on occasion but seem wildly inconsistent.
In my opinion we are not good enough to go up. That was awful. The championship has changed from being a really entertaining league to being a league where teams are so scared of losing they play anti football. I would take winning over performance every time but this team is so painfully poor. A half decent team would have beaten us today. We got a big slice of luck with the post and pen. It really showed how bad this league has become.
That’s because we are not improving. We’re no better now than we were in our first away match of the season. Today would have been another deserved 0-0 draw, and would have but for the late generosity of the referee. Our natural better quality and some good luck at key moments are seeing us get better results than performances merit. I’ve totalled up all the points we would have got had results matched performances. We would have been on only 20 points. We’ve been the equal to our opponents in virtually every game. The only two merited victories came against Luton and Preston. Every other win have come from fine margins going our way. It would be extraordinary for that to continue for the rest of the season. The teams above seem to be gaining some good consistency. We are just hanging in there because the football gods are on our side it appears. I’m assuming the two Covid players were Hughes and Sierralta, so meaning Murray is not even getting on the bench. Ivic prefers to leave the ninth spot vacant or put in two substitute keepers instead of him. If that is the case, I find this absolutely crazy and disrespectful to a seasoned pro. I like Ivic in his press conferences but I see no evidence that he’s the guy who is going to get us promoted.
Berghuis has done it regularly to be fair. Second top scorer this season in Ereverdise is no joke. And a fully-fledged Dutch international. We got that one wrong IMO, yet somehow Pendaranda, Success, Oulare all stayed on our books for so long. Will never quite understand The Pozzo way to be honest. Berghuis probably worth £20-30 million now.
It's an absolutely fantastic scouting model tbf, but the putting it all together to make a coherent team...that's the bit where it all falls apart!
Think Birmingham kick-started the decline of this league, they got that points deduction and I think it scared teams into not wanting to spend quite as much because of FFP. It used to be a wild west in which you were never sure which way a game would go...I guess that's still the case, but the big difference is you can look at this league now and say with near certainty which teams will finish in the top 4/5 spots and which teams will finish in the bottom 4/5, whereas just a couple of years ago you had surprise packages on a regular basis
I mean, yeah maybe the identification of talent part is strong but the other element which I thought involved selling at optimum is sorely lacking. Deeney at £30 million to Leicester. Cool, we all wanted to him stay at this point but we’re not highly paid professionals with details of the inner workings. Doucoure was a £40 million player, we kept him too long, stunk the place out, relegated and sold for £20 million. Richarlison was good business and even he is now worth more than what we probably sold him for tbh. Didn’t we also turn down £36 million for Ighalo and sell him for £20 million a summer later? Even Derby managed to sell Vydra to Burnley for more than they paid us for him lol. Not geniuses at all. It’s not unique in it’s brilliance, Brentford is what I call smart running of a football club, we’re not there. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
You have to feel sorry for Murray, he's been largely poor in the little we've seen of him, but is he really so terrible that he can't even get on the bench when we name 2 goalkeepers?
Fair play to Mazzarri, he might have been a generally moody guy here, couldn't speak a lick of English and had us playing some dreadful stuff (even if he did have a horrendous amount of injuries), but he was spot on about Deeney all those years back. Did we reject £30m for him? Can't quite remember what was up there. Pretty sure Ighalo himself turned down a move to China in the summer of 2016, if so, you can't quibble at the Pozzos for that and we got good money a few months later for a striker who by then was woefully out of form, but yeah, for a supposedly 'selling club', we've had precious few big sales. It's possibly only Richarlison and Lukebakio who we've got any kind of 'decent' fee for, the rest we waited until relegation to sell...
Im pretty sure leicester were offering 20 not 30. Ighalo had been world class for half a season when United came in. Richarlison is worth over 60 now. Brentford, Southampton Leicester all have vastly superior scouting models to us. Overall we get plenty of good players, I feel the problem with the club is more institutional and the cult of Deeney. Managers realise if they pander to Troy they'll keep their jobs longer. Ivic's comments about Troy make his job safer. He's the main man yet again. Troy will support Ivic for now.
Full marks, at least you are now being honest, you want us to lose and are proud of it. Unlike others like @GoingDown that clearly want us to lose but try and hide behind continual sarcasm.
And yet someone on my ignore list is continually quoting my posts to have a dig at me, without which, I'd be blissfully unaware of their presence.
If we can hang on to a top six place by underperforming every week, I can’t wait to see what will happen when we start to play well!
Someone quoted (sorry can’t find it) that only 3 teams has won their last 2 games, Barnsley, Norwich and ourselves, if we can make it three wins on the trot on Tuesday that would be brilliant and make us very serious contenders!
We are a team in transition, so no reason to expect promotion apart from supporters OTT expectations. We have got rid of a load of players in a very short preseason and need to continue to make changes in each window. That won’t be easy as we need to raise funds before we can bring in new blood. The young players need time, which can be frustrating to watch at times.
The owners certainly expect promotion with this specific set of players. Duxbury's comments confirmed that, Ivic has been saying that all along. Unless they are lying again.
The two keepers thing has been completely glossed over by just about everyone. Funny that it was the ultimate thing that everyone remembers Mazzarri for and even he did it as two fingers to the club/fans but with Ivic - don't mention it.
Circumstances mean this isn’t the reality. As soon as we couldn’t shift Deeney, Gray and Capoue (and indeed nobody paid £40m for Sarr) this became a promotion or bust season. And right now we do have one of the best squads, likely due to Covid. Either we go up or next season we will be forced to sell Sarr/Hughes. We can only hope we can asp get Dawson, Deeney, Gray and Capoue off the club payroll which would then allow us to start from square one without very highly paid poorly motivated ageing players. This season is a one off chance to take a shortcut. Otherwise the real transition starts in the summer and that will be a 5 year path. This is why I think we can’t afford to put up with ivic’s directionless tactics that underutilise the squad.
I believe that's the idea of the ignore functions in general on websites. When person A doesn't want to see the posts or replys of person B then person A puts person B on ignore. Then it shouldn't matter what person B says because person A can't see it so doesn't have to worry about it because the reason person A put person B on ignore was that they didn't like what person B was saying in the first place and no longer wished to read their posts.
I’m not convinced it’s a better scouting model than anywhere else - it used to be but not anymore. The ratio at which they signed cheap, developed and sold big was amazing years ago at Udinese. But these days the success rate is no different than anywhere else. As I said in the summer, do Burnley get praise at every turn for their model? Tarkowski, Pope, Keane, Gray all signed and worth/sold for much more than the initial outlay. Southampton scouted Mané. The big clubs all scout from Africa and South America now too. We are not unique anymore and the success ratio is low. There seems to be far more names plying their trade in the lower reaches of Spanish football or obscurely elsewhere in Europe on loan than genuine success stories. I wish we’d put more effort into developing a genuinely exciting first team squad for the here and now and just accept that other clubs have cottoned on to what used to make the owners unique in their ways.
Aha I see. I wasn't aware you got notifications from the people you put on ignore. I suppose you will just have to have ignore the notifications/reply's from those on your ignore list.
I think the point though is that they aren’t actually in it to just sell players at the peak of their value. Sure there is an element of that to it, there has to be, they aren’t wealthy owners so we can only try and compete via player trading. But players like Igahlo, Doucoure and Deeney weren’t sold because they were seen as being beneficial to the team and keeping them would’ve been better for us in the long term compared to cashing in there and then.
Absolutely agree. If we can't use Sarr better we don't deserve to go up. We do need an actual striker at some point. And a central midfielder. Big January window for the owners to decide how high we aim. Or hang on in the top 6 before recalling Gerry for the last few games to fire us to the title!
I put this particular user on ignore because he got upset that I insulted him for some reason. I've blissfully ignored him for a year or more, but about 30% of all notifications I receive are from him and another particular lunatic tagging me or quoting me. I disagree with most things you post, but you're a genial sort and I've no issue with you.
I could be wrong but I think the owners are expecting promotion from Ivic this season. I have a feeling if we don't achieve it or don't look like achieving it then Ivic will be gone. That is one of the main reasons my own expectation was a top 6 finish end of the season and give ourselves a chance of achieving it.
I’m not sure we will sign anyone in January. Keeping Sarr and Hughes would be a statement of promotion intent and reassess in the summer imo. Get rid of Deeney/Capoue/Gray/Dawson if we can. Maybe terminate Murray loan and get another striker on loan or from Udinese. I think we are pretty skint. It’s all irrelevant if Ivic doesn’t begin to show improvements though. We will plod around either side of the playoff line and if we do get in then Ivic won’t have the answer when we hit adversity in a playoff match.
