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Could you imagine how good we'd be if we had everyone fit and firing?

It really is - he just sees and executes in such a fluid motion, often with just one touch to play the pass - and we're away.

It's this, 100%.

This would be the perfect time for him to come into form tbf. And yes, you're right, that ability to drive with the ball is something we've missed and is a very useful outlet.

It is a lot, but that's the reality of the situation if we want quality players who we know are good enough. A lot of it will depend on whether we're CL next season tbf.

I was wondering who the last CM we had that did better than this in the prem, and it looks like Gareth Barry's 2007/08 season was it - he notched 9 goals and 13 assists in all comps. I'll be very surprised if Dougie doesn't beat 22 goal contributions before the end of the season.

If he keeps this up and would be willing to take a little bit of a pay cut, I think we should definitely be looking into it. The style of play seems to play to his relative strengths as a footballer and defender, as he's more technical than physical, but still a good defender in his own right.

Yeah, he had 4 seasons of being top class tbf.

Everything they said when they wrote him off as a player. What part of that was correct? It was pretty obvious that he struggled in his first year at the club but there were mitigating factors - his injuries, the new league and team and 2 managers sacked in his time. We didn't buy a complete unknown who Unai magicked into something amazing - we bought a player who had proven himself in the Bundesliga and was one of the best wingers in that league at the time. It was a major coup for us given where we were in the grand scheme of things. This is what he was doing: There's no doubt that Unai has got him back on track, plus helped him develop and add some stuff to his game, but let's not pretend that he was 'slow, lazy, one-footed, a bad player' etc. because he never was. It doesn't take any special skill to point out that a player is not playing well but those at the time did not simply say that, they wrote him off completely, as per those comments highlighted.

It's a bold move defending awful takes that have been proven completely wrong 'No! They were right to be wrong!' Derp.

You can tell from the way he celebrates our goals how much it means to him too. Legend.

Showed some serious strength today in some of his challenges

Agreed - thought he was brilliant.

World class assist - Jesus that was good

PAOK or Olympiakos for me.

Olympiakos are dogshit, don't worry about them.

Well why wouldn't Bayern consider him ffs? He's an amazing manager. That doesn't mean that he'd go because I don't think it's a very exciting project for him; he's already managed the modern-day French equivalent at PSG and I don't think he'd want to go back to being a smaller cog in a large machine with a lot less input than he has now. Still though, it would make sense that they'd look at him.

Best we've ever had. Hands down.

He's getting there and just at the right time too. If he hits form, he could really help us in our quest for CL football.

The time for laughing at them was 6 months ago tbf You need to get with the cool crowd, bro

I hope someone has a clip of him celebrating Watkins' second today - it was like he was trying to aggressively start a chainsaw.

He's superb, no question. We've got and had some very good players, but I can't remember one who had such strong mental AND technical ability. Doug is up there too for that IMO.

Very brief cameo but he gave us exactly what Emery wanted from him - energy and tenacity to help see the game out.

One thing I've noticed about him is that by skinning the players trying to press him early doors, he actually makes them stand off because they don't want to look stupid getting done by a centre back