tom_avfc

Depends who gets the job I guess. As much as people wanted to slate Smith for starting training later I highly doubt he’s the only manager in the world that holds training sessions later in the day.

I think appointing a manager based on performances with an international team would be bizarre. It’s a completely different job to managing a club. I have no idea who the manager of Denmark is though so wouldn’t really be able to comment on his career to date.

Looks like it was nothing to do with the Smith sacking. He’s never struck me as the sort that would act like that to be honest. Any excuse to pile abuse on a player with no context though I guess. Social media at its finest again!

If we’ve got a time machine then by all means get him in as a box to box midfielder. If we’ve sacked Smith to bring in Gerrard then I worry for the future of the club.

I mentioned elsewhere but I think that Grealish going was a tough one for them to take. The fact that we made money on transfers in the summer rather than invest further suggests to me that they had given up hope of competing a little. I’m still hoping for a Favre or a Potter to suggest that we’re still an exciting, ambitious place to be. However I fear that we’ll see a Gerrard or Terry come in which won’t fill me with confidence that they haven’t given up.

They’re both pens to be honest. You shouldn’t need to go down to get a pen. It’s a foul by Clark and it’s a shirt pull by whoever it was yesterday. The inconsistency in VAR officials is concerning.

Well obviously not at the moment. Given that we have 26 games to go and need just over a point a game to stay up I’m not particularly fussed that Norwich have won away at Brentford etc. just yet. We have half a team worth of injured players to come back and a January transfer window to sort out midfield issues. It’s a bit early to be wetting the bed because Burnley fluked a point away at Chelsea.

We’re eleven games into the season. We have 26 games to get around another 28 points. I’m not quite sure we should be paying too much attention to other teams’ results quite yet. Just concentrate on doing the business ourselves.

Bailey left wing, Buendia right wing and Ings up front? Means dropping Watkins but not sure what the issue with those three playing together is to be honest.

It doesn’t really matter what the plan is if the taker hits the first man 90% of the time. Our inability to cross in general whether from a dead ball or open play makes a set piece coach’s job nigh on impossible.

He was going anyway. He’d either have ran his contract down and moved on the cheap or we got £100m for him. If we can’t reinvest that £100m effectively then that’s where the issue lies.

Why? It got us £100m for a player that we’d otherwise have been lucky to get half of that for. He wasn’t signing a long term contract without that clause.

I genuinely can’t believe that we’re debating which of Gerrard, Lampard or Terry we would choose to take over. If those are the options you can put me firmly in the Dean Smith camp. As it is I think he’ll go. Whether we can attract someone better than the three names above or Craig Shakespeare will tell everyone whether NSWE still believe in the project here. I’m starting to fear that losing Grealish and the Newcastle takeover might be to NSWE what the Man City takeover was to Randy Lerner to be honest.

He seemed to be playing centre midfield in the second half. Somewhat worrying that he looked better in the midfield than McGinn and Nakamba. Not a clue why he was trying to get sent off in the first half but was no less wasteful than our record signing and our other winger who cost three times as much.

The lack of effort he puts in is more worrying for me than anything else. Genuinely looked like he couldn’t be bothered for most of that 90 minutes.

For who? Didn’t have a good game but you could stick a prime Zidane next to Nakamba in a midfield two and he’d look useless too.

Agree with this although, as you say, Sanson is the big unknown in all of this. If he comes into the side and performs then we may be in a position where we have a decent midfield of Luiz, Sanson, McGInn. If that's the case then I'd like us to be signing players that are as good or better than these so that we end up with the Watkins/Ings problem in the midfield as well. In particular a strong defensive midfielder would be a priority for me as its a position where we don't currently have a capable player and there's doubtless games where that would be a useful option.

So you'd have gone Mcginn, Carney and Ramsey as the middle 3 to start that game. I mean our midfield was weak enough as it was but that midfield wouldn't stand a chance. The West Ham game to me feels like a game where Smith couldn't really win. Before the game there wasn't a single combination in midfield that I thought would give us any chance of winning that game. As it was the combination which we ended up with competed reasonably even with 10 men before conceding two late goals. I don't we'd have got any more success with any other midfield given the players available to us.

There isn't anybody in the world who is going to get this squad into the top 6. If that's what you're expecting then I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. As it is a mid-table season is probably what this squad is capable of. While we're a few points off midtable I don't see the season as a disastrous one especially given the quality of the teams we've played against so far this season. We'll see what happens and if it looks like we'll get drawn into a relegation scrap then I'm sure Smith will go. Until that's the case I'm not sure what the rush to change the manager is all about to be honest.

Did you see the stick that Jacob Ramsey was getting and he was playing in a reasonably successful team . There's nothing to suggest that Carney would be an improvement if asked to do what Ashley Young was against a strong West Ham with 10 men for practically the entire second half. Our fan base would be on his back the moment he had a bad game and given that he's not the blood and thunder type midfielder that a lot of our fans are screaming for I'd wager that the accusations of laziness and not getting involved would be almost immediate. There's a process to getting a player ready for first team football in the Premier League and that to me isn't chucking an 18 year old into an underperforming midfield with no control over any game that we play and expecting him to do anything. A loan would be the best move for him if our other midfielders weren't dropping like flies to be honest.

Has it been a disaster? Looking at the individual results I'm not that convinced. We have wins against Newcastle (h), Everton (h) and Manchester United (a). Draw against Brentford (h). Defeats to Watford (a), Wolves(h), Spurs (a), West Ham (h), Chelsea (a) and Arsenal (a). Of those defeats 5 of those teams look set to finish in the top half of the table with a newly promoted Watford on the first day of the season as a result which looks particularly bad. Obviously the Wolves game is a tough one to take but given that they are now one of the in form teams of the division and up to 7th in the league I guess there is some context to it. So for me the particularly bad results are losses to Watford (in their first game post promotion), the defeat to Wolves (given the nature of it) and the draw with Brentford (although again they hit the ground running post promotion). Lets say that that's potentially 6-8 points additional that I think we could realistically expect from those games. Against that you can throw in the win away at Manchester United which is 3 points that we almost never get in a season to leave us somewhere around 3-5 points off where I'd expect us to be. Given that we haven't been able to name our first eleven in any match this season due to international breaks, injuries, illness and whatever else has gone on I don't see it as an unmitigated disaster as you are claiming. 7 out of the 10 teams that we have played are currently in the top half of the table and I'd expect at least 6 of them to be there come the end of the season. I think its far too early to be getting rid of a manager who has overseen the period of success that Dean Smith has.

The potential long term side effects is an argument that I don't get as well. Haven't we already got plenty of evidence of long Covid lasting over a year in many cases? I'd take my chances on a highly improbable long term side effect of the vaccine which has never been seen in any previous vaccine over the potential long term effects of contracting Covid itself.

The testing of the vaccination was obviously fast tracked due to the emergency nature of what we're dealing with here. Do you actually know what testing has been done in comparison to other drugs/vaccines? Would you be more comfortable with the development and testing process if it had sat on various people's desks for months and years? Is there a cut off point in terms of years and/or months that would make the idea of having the vaccination more comfortable to you? Yes, it was a fast tracked process because it needed to be. I hate the argument that the speed at which the vaccine has been produced and released means that its not tested properly. Its discrediting the great work that many people have put in to get a vaccine in place to mitigate some of the threat caused by the most serious pandemic in years.

I genuinely thought there were two red cards in that incident. I'm not sure how a referee can look at Hause forearm smashing a guy in the face and not think its a red card. Its the sort of challenge that if it happened to us we'd be screaming for the red card and when the VAR check was going on I was pretty sure it would get upgraded to the red. Konsa was unlucky but the guy is through on goal and once a foul is given there's no way that its not a red card. To be honest for a referee to give that foul and not send the player off is pretty poor as well. I thought that he got the bookings involved in the challenge on Nakamba right as well to be honest (although McGinn was unfortunate) as well as the stupid melee afterwards. The annoying thing about that decision is that he should have played the advantage as we were on a dangerous break.

Given that until this season we seemed to give the ball away from our throw ins a high proportion of the time I don't have much issue with a long throw into the box. It creates a problem for the oppositions defence. I've never really got the hatred for long throws as a tactic. Teams lump corners into the box every game and nobody bats an eyelid. If you you have a player who can reach the penalty area from throw ins I'm not sure its too dissimilar to corners. Having said that, Bailey didn't seem to have the distance on his throws so I'm not sure why we don't just use Cash from both sides if we want to utilise long throws.