andym

its a myth that championship is full of big physical teams who just play hoofball with loads of old fashioned cloggers. Most of the best teams actually play decent football, and there are plenty of less physical but skillful players who dominate If Barry Bannan can look good in the Championship, then Gil definitely can

only listened on radio, but sounded like he put the ball right on Richard's head for what should have been a certain goal within 2 minutes of coming on

Last season we had a poor squad with a handful of really good players who basically kept us up. If you lose those good players you have (imo) two main options if you have a pretty tight budget. You could spend the money you get trying to directly replace them and hope for the same outcome (i.e. they carry the team and keep you up). However, i'm not sure we would ever have replaced Benteke with a similar quality player, and you could possibly say the same for Delph, depending how high you rate him. Alternatively you sign a lot of average but good enough to cope in the prem players, who replace the good players but also the poor players. So in terms of squad make up there are less extremes, but the overall strength is still enough to stay up. We didn't take either of the options - we basically signed a few average ones to try and replace the good ones, but were still left with a lot of the poor players (and also added to them in some cases). So overall the strength of the squad reduced. Like Grasshopper says, we simply didn't spend enough money

Funny you mention Pearson, as he worked with a transfer committee at Leicester (Steve Walsh is head of recruitment). Martyn Glover, who was head of recruitment when Allardyce was at West Ham is apparently set to rejoin him at Sunderland in the same role. Most teams operate in this way. A transfer committee is not a bad thing in principle, and i'd say putting one in place is one of the few good ideas the club has had. Obviously though it falls down if you don't have the right people on it - and we clearly didn't.

no but i think overall hes been a competent premier league player, same with Gana, and to be honest although im not really a fan, Westwood as well. Look at some of the other midfields out there and there are some very average players. For example, Gardner at West Brom, Ledley and McArthur at Palace, look at the Bournemouth midfield that started yesterday that included the likes of Dan Gosling and Marc Pugh. Stoke regularly play Charlie Adam and Glen Whelan. The difference between them and us is that other teams have either at least 1 good or very good player in the midfield who can carry others (e.g. Fletcher at WBA, Cabaye at Palace), very good players further up the pitch who open things up and take the pressure off the midfield (such as at Stoke) or have a system that has been implemented over a few years and works very very well for the players in it (Bournemouth). The problem is we have none of those. All of our midfielders are competent but not good enough to control a game, with the exception of Ayew we don't have any quality further up the pitch, and with the turnover of players and manager we havent had chance to develop a system.

possibly a better chance of a win against those listed than against Leicester though. Leicester are the best away team in the league, and they've only lost two league games all season.

Fitness is much improved, and i think we are generally putting in more effort, if we still lack quality.

the Sinclair sub was because Ayew was done - he could hardly run.

hes been good recently, but he was way off it today in open play (i thought most of his set pieces were still generally good, whipped into the right area) to be fair, i didnt think he went hiding, even though nothing he did came off

not unhappy with the effort 2nd half, at least we battled a bit more, although you can tell confidence is still shaky, with the frankly appalling passing being the main indicator as it has been all season, we lack a real goalscorer - i think Kozak should have scored at least 1 today. We also need to learn how to cross

got to hit the target Kozak

damn, best bit of skill Gestede has ever done and then he messes up the pass

chance for westwood to drive in and shoot - turns and passes it back

just stand there and let him cross why dont you

huth arm to the face again

wow a bit of good fortune

get Veretout off, hes having a shocker okore and lescott all over the place again though

Ayew the only one with any real quality, thats 2 good set ups in the last few minutes

leicester had a midfielder on the edge of the box then waiting for a shot - when do we ever do that?

leicester just send 2 or 3 to tackle one of our players and the rest of our team just watch as their teammate gets robbed

shocking passing all round

wow, side on replay of the goal makes it look even worse by lescott, he was about 15 yards infront of okazaki when vardy hit the lob

our defending is shambolic, whoever plays piss poor by okore and lescott for the goal, and the penalty came from a throw in into our box where all our players just stood there watching

we want far too much time on the ball, and you dont get it against leicester

shambolic defending yet again - all that came from a throw in that we let leicester control in the box