poitier

I think they deserve a lot of credit for the way they have turned it around since January.

One phrase that has been bandied about far too much in my opinion is 'mental strength' and their lack of it. That phrase is just a catch all attempt to easily explain the numerous times that we have dropped points from winning positions, regardless of what the actual footballing reasons were.

The amount of pressure that they have had to deal with in the last dozen games of the season, the number of must win games that they have won, suggests to me that 'mental strength' is not really much of a problem.

The last place I was expecting that shot from Gabby to end up was the bottom corner, absolutely class finishing.

A lot of our players looked off the pace today, but a brilliant result in the end.

Lowton was immense tonight.

Shame we didn't have the mental strength to get a seventh.

Glad he has stiffened up the midfield, we don't want Sessegnon running at our back 4.

Is KEA injured then since not in the squad, I would have preferred him ahead of Sylla?

He heasn't really had much of a look in since we have got more settled into our 433/4213 formation, and I think he could fit into it well. He has composure on the ball and I think he could provide a good link between the midfield and forwards.

Poor defending for the goals regardless of the offsides. Bennett was back to piss poor after recent improvement.

I think we can take heart from the second half, unlucky not to get a goal, Al Ahmadi probably our best player, and not the first time he has come on and done well.

I like how Gary Neville called it a little bit of an offside for the first goal

I hope that was our bad half.

Apart from van Persie there is nothing in that ManU team that scares me, and I think we will have some joy against that defence.

Ok, so we are probably going to lose, but i can't help feeling that if we play well, if we take our chances and if noone messes up badly, there could be something in this for us.

I thought we weren't at our best by a long way today, and were flattered by the fact that Fulham were as lacklustre as we had hoped. We had that spell for 10 minutes after we scored where we could have killed it off but fell away after that. I don't know what shape we were playing by the end.

Holman made some good contributions, I would have thought he is a better fit in the wide area than Bowery, who himself didn't play badly but didn't give us enough going forward.

Definitely two points dropped.

Confident of a win today, maybe even a convincing win.

Guzan is a fantastic keeper. It's our defense that lets us down.

It is improving though. I think Bennett is starting to look a lot better, no longer the liability he was and makes some good passes. You might have expected him to get bullied by Stoke but he wasn't.

I was grateful Crouch wasn't playing, cos Jones is utter shite.

Very good performance today, obviously well done to the players, but also Lambert for having big enough balls to change things up for such a crucial game.

That was a good half, so expect us to be rubbish in the second. Think we might have needed to convert one of those other chances.

The only solution is for uefa to give us a champions league place.

Brilliant, well done lads, absolutely bossed the game in the second half.

So, about a third of our squad and around £3m a year is how it's helping us.

We're seriously close to going down because most of them are currently not good enough to perform at this level.

And £3 million a year while not to be sniffed at is hardly the kind of money that can then be spent on quality players.

We keep developing very average players with only a small amount being good enough to be considered good premiership players.

It's hardly the stuff of dreams and like I said there's not much to show its helping the first team.

Maybe the next batch will be different.

Of course most of them are average, by definition, the majority of players will be average.

Our biggest problem is that we need to score at least two goals every game if we are to have any chance of winning. Playing a midfield three of Bannan, Westwood & Sylla virtually nullifies the chances of that happening.

 

I certainly don't think Bannan will play against Stoke, I would expect Delph to come back in and stay in for the rest of the season. Delph/Westwood/Sylla is probably the best midfield we have got (unless playing 4-2-3-1 with Nzog in place of Sylla), and although that doesn't fill me with confidence it doesn't fill me with dread either.

I think even if Gabby had scored with that first half chance and we had gone in 2-0 up at H-T, we would still have lost the game with that second half performance. Liverpool could have gone on to score more than two if needed.

We still can't produce two decent halves of football in the same match. Desperately poor second half, created nothing after that header was cleared off the line.

Such a bad decision from Baker to go sliding in for the pen, don't know what he was thinking.

A game that told us nothing we didn't already know.

Vlaar looks poor today.

If we want to press them in midfiled Delph would seem to be a better option than Bannan. Not sure I understand that one.

I was very optimistic about our chances of staying up, today's results have knocked that a little bit.

Ok, so Wigan got a win, but in a game that they were expected to win, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are 'doing a Wigan' again. I think we will be this season's Wigan, results have been improving, confidence is up and Delph back from suspension. I can see us finishing strongly and being clear of trouble before the final game, even if we fail to pick up any points tomorrow.

Our glass is half full.