tom_avfc

I mean he’s hardly comparable to Wesley but seems to get more stick than him (at least where I’m sat in the ground). His inability to make the ball “stick” isn’t that surprising when he’s quite often having to run 40 yards across the pitch to get to wherever the latest punt upfield is landing and then has no team mate within 30 yards of him. He didn’t struggle to make the ball stick from the hit and hope pass that led to his goal. I really struggle to see how he’s the player that’s taking so much criticism when you look at his performances over two years and his commitment to the cause.

I agree with most of this but would also say that Watkins has the potential to improve as we improve. He got 14 goals in a team that played much more to his strengths last season and had much more creativity just for Grealish’s presence in the team. Reading on here it’s as if Watkins is regularly missing chance after chance but his xG is roughly one goal above what he’s scored. It’s why the argument “he only scored goals because of Grealish” is so stupid. Striker scores more goals when given more chances shouldn’t be that much of a surprise to anybody.

Should he have wrapped the game up a couple of times? Had a couple of breakaways but there were far clearer chances for others. Ings chance from his 1-2 with Watkins, Buendia’s chance from just outside the box and Ramsey’s one on one (albeit the rebound eventually went in) were all far clearer opportunities. I’d also add in the poor pull back from Ramsey when he got to the byline inside the box as a clearer chance than anything that Watkins missed. It seems to me that Watkins attracts far more criticism than others no matter what happens in a game.

It’s the same at the ground where I sit. I’ve never known a player who has generally served us as well as Watkins has to take so much stick from fans. I don’t really get it to be honest. He’s a young promising striker who is likely to hit double figures in both of his premier league seasons yet people are calling for Kienan Davis to start ahead of him. His work rate is generally exceptional so I’m not sure what he does that rubs people up the wrong way to be honest.

I’d imagine because the original poster is expecting survival to be somewhere on 37-39 points which looks reasonable with the table as it stands now. In all reality we should get the 3 points or so that we’re probably going to need. However having watched us recently it’s far from as guaranteed as it should be.

Neither team was particularly good against us to be honest. We’re just one of the easiest teams to beat in the league at the moment.

This sort of argument always reminds me of Ross McCormack. Always scored 20 odd goals for teams that never looked like going up from the championship. I don’t think that was entirely down to those around him and McCormack was never the player that his goal return suggested.

Good to see another team that isn’t us beating a top 6 team. Shock horror. Brighton haven’t given them a sniff here.

Yeah to be honest I had no issue with him doing that either. He'd get yellow carded for it but its an understandable reaction. Headbutting Sterling and then continuing to try and fight in the tunnel after the game are unacceptable though.

My issue with that is whether he’s the best man we could get to overhaul the squad in the summer as it seems we are set to do. If we are going to go big at it in the transfer window then we can’t afford to get it wrong. Nothing that I have seen since he arrived leads me to believe that he will get it right. I worry that we’ll be moving on players that we will come to regret and that a bad start to next season could lead to it all becoming toxic pretty quickly.

Fortunately the Liverpool game has been moved as that would be more than likely 6 losses on the bounce if we still had that one to play.

I’d expect a premier league keeper to make every one of those saves. Our best chances were ones where we didn’t hit the target (or even the ball in Ings’ case).

You think Smith decided to not sign a defensive midfielder and to spend big money on a second striker having played one up front for his entire time at the club?

I’m sure many were saying that any manager that loses 5 in a row would be in serious trouble earlier in the season. Does anyone fancy us to get a result at Leicester?

If they announce a large price rise this week that might be me out too. I’d hold it back a week or two if I was purslow.

It was too high for him to get over wasn’t it? Only seen it live but looked it to me. Thought our other striker was far more wasteful today.

Significantly underperforming his xG by one goal. If he had one more goal would everything be alright. To have a striker who has played practically every game and has an xG of 9 is the issue here. We are playing dull football and not creating enough.

Why would anybody care what he did as a player against us? Why is the default response to anybody questioning whether we’re improving under Gerrard to say “you never wanted him in the first place”? Questioning a manager after three poor defeats in a row (with more than likely another couple on the way) is pretty natural. The fact that the football is pretty dull to watch doesn’t help. There’s valid reasons to doubt whether we should be handing Gerrard £100m plus in the summer.

Luiz is going to have his pick of teams in European competition when he leaves. It’s similar to Coutinho. Why would a player take the risk that the next £100m we spend is going to be the one that works when we look a million miles away at the moment?

I wonder if it’s more the other way around to be honest. We’re safe and there’s a good chance Luiz isn’t here after the summer. Probably factors into Gerrard’s thoughts for the rest of the season. Replacing him with a player that simply can’t play defensive midfield was pretty ridiculous though and set that entire midfield up to fail yesterday.

21 games, 26 points in that bottom table. With spurs at home and Leicester away next up I think that top table is likely to read 21 games, 26 points in a couple of weeks time. I just don’t see any real improvement. We were a patchy mid table team under smith and are a patchy mid table team under Gerrard. The only thing that has changed for me is that we looked like we had a plan for the majority of Smith’s time at the club. Now we look devoid of any ideas and set to overhaul the squad again in the summer.

I just don’t see the improvement from the start of the season to now. Out of interest of the 11 teams that we played under Smith we’ve now played all of them except for Spurs in the reverse games. Smith took 10 points from those eleven teams. Gerrard has managed 8 with Spurs still to play. We got rid of a manager at a time when we could have got a proven manager in and instead we’re letting someone learn on the job (and spend millions in the process) to hope he can get it right. Gerrard’s answer to how to get it right is to spend millions on new players. How about getting us playing something that resembles a premier league football team before the end of the season or you don’t get the right to chuck a load of money at it?

The teams we’ve beaten under Gerrard are all teams you’d expect us to beat on paper. Pretty much every manager gets a win against one of the top teams over the course of a season but we are literally losing every game against them. Where’s our Brentford against Chelsea performance? Palace have took 4 points off Man City. Even Leeds have beaten West Ham and Wolves. For me it’s not a great look for a manager if we’re happy to accept that we’ll lose every game to teams above us in the table.

The only way we ever look like scoring is from Watkins running in behind and one of our defenders punting the ball behind their defence. Even when he gets chances he’s generally run about 30 yards to get onto a long ball. Showed for England that he can be a bit of a poacher but if it wasn’t for his runs we wouldn’t get the ball within the final third of the pitch. No surprise that he scored double the number of the goals with Grealish’s creativity alongside him.

I’d expect an average top level striker to score that chance. But even the best strikers in the world miss chances. Danny Ings was a player that I always considered a top finisher and he’s missed his fair share of chances this season too.