romavillan

whilst that's true, our summer signings weren't additions to a team, they were an attempt at making a team in the first place. Now they are starting to look like there might be a team in there somewhere we would be incredibly stupid not to add 3 or 4 players at £10m a pop right now if they were available and would come. We all knwo that won't happen though.

West brom at home will always be a stain on my soul

30 seconds added by ref to min 5 minutes? Garde was fine today for me, woke them up at half time and they looked lost before that. If we show the kind of commitment we have now showed for 135 mins of the last 180 then we will at least go down fighting. which to be fair is all we asked for when Garde came in. Best game for Gana for me, he was immense in the second half, westwood showing some good touches too. 4 points from 2 games!

The curly wurly is pushing it tbh

Remember that one touch stuff edge of our box, 4 or 5 quick one touch passes between CBs and midfield before it going out to Bacuna (then it coming back but let's forget that) that was a big sign for me of what Garde is trying to get them to do.

Heady days

Let Sherwood go, he inherited a team shackled with negativity but with all the elements of a team in place then he rode a wave of near euphoria over the summer, changed a lot of peoples minds back end of last season and then totally **** us up royally. Garde on the other hand walked into the most horribly poisonous situation and has been tasked with creating a football team from the various shattered pieces left behind. It was an already hopeless situation, the fact he has managed to get a performance from this group like last night is a minor miracle IMHO.

Apart from the glaring defensive horrorshow straight out the gate we actually looked organised at the back for the whole game. loads of hard yards put in, passion, lots of things which had been only seen in some players some of the time were on display from all of them for 90 mins. Ayew had another great game, Garde must take a lot of credit for seemingly being a cool head when All around him are losing theirs. We are still down but hopefully Garde can now start getting some results.

Will be interesting to see how they line up, Kozak hopefully will be fired up to try and prove a point.

what a beautiful goal, all one and 2 touch, good movement and with the last 2 passes very good awareness and vision. it is the basics, having, and being sure you have, a great first touch earns you time and space. It shouldn't be somethign a professional has to think about. Too often our team, through shattered confidence, has players in who don't have enough faith in themselves to control a ball when opposition players are close. Recipe for disaster, a vicious circle that is hard to break. Remi is tasked with breaking it, and I think judging by how often we have decent first 20 mins looking organised before an inevitable mental collapse after the other team score, he does do good work on the training ground. We do look more compact and have better shape than early in the season. We need more than good preparation though now, we need some new players and we need to start playing with some more belief. Belief enough to get the basics right...

Apparently we talked to Moyes when we got Garde, you would hope BOTH interviews were along the lines of how to rebuild the club from the ground up....

fine them a limb, they'll only do it once

Here we are again, divisions over whether we should give an abysmally performing manager more time or sack him after a couple of months I really don't see what chaning the manager is going to do for this group of players. I mean, a new manager woudl have to assess the squad and then try and get players in, a third of Jan is gone already. It's not even slightly practical to sack Garde now. A lot of the reason why we haven't got results with Garde is the players insisting on playing for 95% of a game to a reasonable level and then seemingly totally forgetting how to be a footballer for 5-10 mins. Bad enough if you have one player like that, we look to have at least half a dozen at the moment. They contrive to do badly DESPITE being seemingly well prepared by Garde. Even if Garde gets massive backing I'm not sure where he is going to find the players he needs in one window. We need 2 full backs, a centre back, a goalkeeper, a defensive midfielder and at least one striker. That's 6/7 players. That's not going to happen. So, that leads us to him needing the summer too...

How much would you look forward to League One?

I'd go Richards -- Okore -- Clark/Baker Natural left footer on the left, Richards right sided is a natural fit for the right side of a 3 IMO. I'd love to see us try that, or even... ------------------------ Guzan ---------------------- -------- Richards -- Okore -- Clark/Baker --- Bacuna --- Sanchez ---- Veretout ---- Amavi ---------------------Gil---Grealish------------------ -------------------------Ayew------------------------ Hutton for Bacuna, and Troare for either Gil or Grealish is fine too. I think with this group 3 CBs, where we have Richards to cover RB and Clark/Baker to cover LB when they push up, is our best chance of not being so easy to score against. We need a new LB in Jan to take Amavi's place, but this shape lets us get the most out of forward thinking full backs, and lets us play two trequartista's/AM's. I think we'd keep the ball better that way too. Anyway, my take on the % of blame equation I've had a couple of pages back would be 90% Lerner, 9% Sherwood and 1% Garde. Garde is getting undue criticism I think. I think you could name the amount of managers on the thumbs of no hands who could have come in when he did and had us go on a winning run. He has taken a mentally shattered shambolic mess of a group and got them intermittently to play none relegation standard football. That's an improvement. Let's be patient, we are already down, if he had the bollocks to come here in the first place he has earned at least till this point of the coming Championship season to see what he can do. On the Richardson selection, he wasn't picked for his attacking prowess, he was picked to shore up the left side with Bacuna, which largely worked until his ambling back for their second.

I can't believe he is getting so much stick. Embarrassing. Surely it's pretty easy to understand he tried to pick a combination on the left that didn't add up to a gaping hole with a welcome matt for whomever wanted to walk into our box. He's not picked Richardson because he's the next C. Ronaldo has he, it was a move to *try* and be more solid down that side, and to be fair it was working until Clark gifted the ball and then Westwood froze and allowed the cross. I like him, I think his approach to attempting to get us out of the shit is the only sensible one, be more solid, keep the ball better, get some points and start to get some confidence. All of you saying we should just go balls out attacking might not be saying that after some 5 or 6 goal beatings. Training would have to become therapy at that point for some of this lot.

didn't like the fact we lost our discipline at the end, the time to show fight was after their first goal and the start of the second half and the way to do it was either with the ball at your feet or some hard running to keep us in the game without the ball. We were the better team till their first. Again mistakes costing us and just seemed inevitable we would lose after our reaction to that goal. The mistakes in front of goal, like Ayew's header should be a goal really, don't get as much criticism as the mistakes at the other end that made it easy for Norwich to score. If we weren't already relegated then you could find some positives in there. As it is we've ended up looking like a shambles with the handbags at the end after it could have been so different had Ayew's header gone in and we had something to defend and some more confidence. Garde I think prepares them well under the circumstances. He hasn't had that long to work with them and as a group it was a massive ask to take on something so obviously in disarray and shattered mentally. So you know I find it hard to blame Garde for much at all. The first 20-25 mins vindicates his selection and the work he is doing in training. The way they fall apart after that I don't think is his doing and is hopefully something he can put a stop to.

my house, bring beer and be out before the wife gets back....

Yep, if we concede early it'll mean trying to survive till half time and then change it. Trying to legislate for conceding early though as a manager would be more counter productive though surely? Just throwing your hands up and saying we'll never keep a clean sheet so we'll have to try and score 3 would be suicide.

It's a surprise that line up, but I think he's trying to pack the midfield and keep the ball. That's perfectly sensible IMHO, the time to get more attacking players on will be if it's still 0-0 with 20 mins to play and their crowd is frustrated and they've not been seeing much of the ball to get any rhythm going.

you can say that again.

you can say that again.

now or never has indeed gone, long gone. it's now, um, never. we should be thinking about promotion rather than avoiding relegation.

yeah the goal was not an easy thing to do, he got frustrated which perversely even thought he got booked was good to see as at least 1 of them gave a shit. I'd like to see him and more of our creative players together on the pitch at the same time but I understand why that's not going to happen until we have the defense sorted.