steell

I wonder if milner, downing and young have switched around at all or have they been switching at all?

You obviously haven't listened to him much - nonsense is his normal mode, put him on mushrooms and he starts to talk sense.

I reckon the inclusion of Downing and NRC could turn us in to a very decent team, just hope MON can see this. 5 man midfield has to be the way forward.

I think Young is going to have a blinder today, just got a feeling about it.

Completely agree, I think that that is our best shape and with the exception of Luke Young, our best 11.

Sorry but that's a rather odd comment IMO. Either he can continue to improve us as a team and therefore should stay, or he can't and then he should go. You can't state that we'll be no better off in two years time right after saying that you don't want him to go. I want him to stay because I think he'll continue to improve us, nobody should be happy to settle for just more of the same.

OK, make that the 'sad six'.

All this talk about a 20 goal striker is a bit of a myth. If we had a forward line that was regularly missing good opportunities or even failing to make good runs and take up good positions then fair enough but that aint happening. If we need anything we need a central midfielder who gets more assists, Sidwell or Petrov rarely play killer balls, Petrov in particular is excellent at breaking up opposition play and releasing the ball but this is where we miss Barry. Back on topic, duh, he must stay, to say anything else is mental. If we didn't have MON who would be better?? I've had my frustrations with him but there's nobody else who's going to do a better job. If we had an arab trillionaire owner then maybe there's a better 'big signing' manager out there, where man-management is less of an issue, but I'd love to hear who the 'fed-up five' would replace him with.

That is what worries me. Very difficult to hold on to any opinion that's based on the Wigan match - first game of the season, Petrov and Delph never played together before, etc. I'm not saying it will work but I'm just not as concerned as some of you, as long as Cuellar snuffs out the threat from Pedersen then I can't see them hurting us. Villa win 2-0. Delph and Collins

Thought Warnock did really well, solid and confident. Strange to give him only 3?!

Based on this season, it has to be Milner. I've been watching him especially closely in these last few games and he's been phenomenal, his work rate is well talked about, but he's also barely misplaced a pass, his crossing has been great and his tackling has been spot on, all over the park. Young on the other hand has been very sparodic, he's been more moany than usual and he's going down much to easily. Undoubtedly Young possesses more raw skill but I'd have Milner in my team ahead of him every day - on the showing of this season so far.

You posting this from your Iphone in the Holte then? :winkold: I'm stripped down and mixing with the Rapid fans!

VP looks very empty! Bloody armchair, fickle fans.

We'll win this game. As soon as we go two up, we'll revert to 4-5-1 and contain them, they really didn't look very good and we've got nothing to fear here. (See my strategy? Say stuff confidently and gloat when we win, lose and don't log on for a few days!)

I honestly think fitness is a very significant thing and the transformation at Liverpool was centred around energy, tenacity and stamina - I think we'll see a very different performance than Wigan tonight. Well, we better!!

Just MON rotating the squad I think, he said that's what he wanted to do, i wouldn't read too much into it. I bet NRC starts on Sunday.

Ugh???

Brilliant result and thoroughly deserved. I've been saying it for a while, and I was completely vindicated tonight, Davies and Cuellar are good defenders who, for whatever reason, had not clicked together. I'm not saying that we shouldn't buy another CB, I just think that if we continue to play those guys they will get better and better. Only player I was a little disappointed with tonight was Petrov, in the last 20 minutes he just seemed to stop closing down, thankfully NRC and Sidwell kept going the whole 90 mins. BTW - the pathetic talk of Gabby coming back 'fat' was made to look pretty stupid by a)Gabby's work ethic tonight and b)him taking his shirt off at the end! Sod the supposed talk of him letting himself go in the close season, he's obviously been working out very hard.

Happy with that. Don't like Sidwell or Shorey but understand why we have to play them - I'd be very happy if this time next we didn't have to. It's quite defensive and needs to be. I'm going for a good draw.

He'll turn things around this season and have us with a young exciting squad that makes up a significant part of the World Cup squad. Oh, and suddenly there'll be some posters on here going very quiet (here's hoping anyway).

Sidwell is a weak link IMO, get Petrov on

We can go on and win this, if we'd won at the weekend people wouldn't be overreacting so much. We need to get some support to Heskey and just keep plodding away. A goal could see our confidence increase considerably.

This ref is killing this game. We'll score though I reckon, we're slowly getting into it.

Good work Heskey.

This is a significant issue. We didn't just lose two very, very good players in Laursen and Barry we lost two leaders down the spine of our team. There's only Brad left with that quality and I hope MON re-addresses this.