The Premier League - 2021-2022

Calamity Wan-Bissaka on hand again. Makes huge mistakes every game.

 

In fairness then after last Saturday you’d have thought he was safe until Christmas.

 

Could you imagine if that penalty had been given against us? The flapping amongst our fans would be unimaginable. Lol.

 

Anyone getting excited over Chelsea struggling to break United down is not taking into account that Chelsea would easily have been 3-0 up at half-time against us sadly

 

Not sure I've seen anyone doing that, at all, in fairness.

 

If you can't call that, you can't be employed as a linesman

 

Pretty much all the teams around us have decent fixtures in the next two. We really should have picked up at least a point today.

 

We're basically just back to looking at it as a nightmare period we'll have to work twice as hard to recover from in other fixtures, punctuated by that one crazy anomaly against United.

We can only hope that at the end of the season they represent a similar thing to the freak 7 points Xisco managed to accumulate before we called time on his jolly - a slightly inexplicable silver lining that just helps get us over that line, rather than a false dawn ray of hope subsequently dashed.

 

I don't care what anyone says, Mike Parry is a national treasure - in Mike's world adverts are filmed live.

 

Words cannot fully express how dangerously stupid Mike Parry is.

 

Disgraceful stuff from Burnley today, no Premier League club should be having a game called off for snow before it's started. Dock them 10 points.

 

To be fair if I was offered 6 points before the Ranieri initial run I’d have probably taken it. And that’s assuming we lose to Chelsea and City.

 

If we can be out of the drop zone by the time those fixtures are done and dusted (preferably with our goal difference somewhat intact of course!), I'll take that! Mind you, I don't trust us to take advantage of the more winnable fixtures that come after that...

 

It's a good point. When CR70 was appointed, everyone looked at the fixtures and said Southampton was a must win because that was the only points we would get until we play Brentford.

We lost that game so picking up 6 other points is most welcome. We will need some points from the Brentford, Burnley, Palace, Wolves and West Ham games that remain this calendar year. I'm also not discounting a shock point in the next two. With fixture congestion and Champions league sandwiched in between its a straw we can clutch at.

 

To get anything out of the next couple of games we need the combination of the five clowns we field at the back to not make a single error between them in at least one of the games.

It’s a similar feat to matching at least five numbers on the lottery.

 

I believe we’ll need a bare minimum of 19 points by the halfway stage to have any chance of staying up. So that’s 2 more wins from the next 6 games. That’s doable.

But, to me, the second half of the season looks a little harder. We play 4 of the top 6 away and we’ve thrown away a few winnable home fixtures in Newcastle, Southampton & Wolves.

But if we’re on 19 points after 19 matches, I think we’ll have a fighting chance.

 

For some reason I fancy us to conjure a point in one of the two games this week.

 

Fixed.

 

Man City have already qualified as group winners, so will have no need to rest key players against us.

Chelsea's next CL game also isn't for another week after our match.

At home to Chelsea on Wednesday might not have been entirely impossible to get something from as they can sometimes struggle to score against teams that park the bus, but only if we had a full strength team available. As it is we could be missing all of Dennis, Sarr, Nkoulou and Sierralta, which would leave us with zero chance.

Away at City will never be anything other than us getting spanked, whether we're at full strength or not.

 

We're at home to City too. Not that it makes any difference to the rest of your sentence...

 

I see no reason we can't win both comfortably.

It's time for Ashley Fletcher to step up...

 

You say the second half looks harder, but in my opinion it is slightly easier. We have 2 extra home games against non big 6 teams, and the big 6 teams we face at home are Arsenal and Spurs. It doesn't matter where we play Liverpool / City / Chelsea, we aren't taking points off them this season.

 

Step up? He barely looked like he could time a jump yesterday.

 

That's Spurs that will have been under Conte for two full months at that point, though - not saying he's about to turn them into prime Barca, but they already beat Leeds despite being woeful for an entire half, clearly second best, and it won't be like the reverse fixture under Nuno in September (which we still lost... ).

 

Fair enough, I didn't figure we'd be at home twice in a row. But yeah we never get anything from City either way.

 

I'd also have taken 2 points out of our last 2 games to be fair...

 

Probably will end up with parachute payments being reduced but not abolished, and the rest of the Championship getting more from the big league, which would be make for a much more competitive and much less chaotic (financially speaking) Championship

 

In some sort of fantasy land maybe. In reality it'll make it harder for clubs like Watford to compete if they get promoted. The chaos in the Championship is caused by pisspoor financial controls at individual clubs and throwing more cash at them isn't going to solve that. The usual suspects will just piss it up the wall then come back to the PL again asking for more.

The PL should be asking the EFL one question - "When are you getting rid of parachute payments between your divisions and L2 and the National League?"

 

I don't see how the two are mutually exclusive tbf, you'd get clubs who are better able to compete with the Bournemouths and the Fulhams of this world, but who then aren't even as able to compete as well as they did last time they were in the Prem. I'm not under any illusions here that any changes would benefit teams like us tbf!

 

Surely 14 clubs have to vote for it, and judging by that article there doesn’t seem to be much will to get rid of them even amongst clubs that are relatively safe PL clubs.

Ultimately the PL aren’t going to want to devalue their product, they won’t want a situation where the three promoted teams do a Norwich as there isn’t any safety net in place.

If they get scrapped this will just end up like a lot of things in history, after a long enough period people tend to forget the reason why something works the way it does and decide to change it, before long you’ll get a club end up in administration because they got relegated and bet the farm on staying up. Everyone will suddenly be saying we should have a mechanism in place to prevent that from happening again…. like parachute payments.

 

TBF it was a nasty looking shaver nick that ruled him out.