tom_avfc

We lost 7 games under smith this season. Of those 7 teams we’ve lost to Watford, West Ham, Arsenal, Chelsea and Wolves again under Gerrard and beaten Southampton. Given we spent pretty big in January are we getting any better?

I thought it was a good sub and key to why we finished strongly. We finally had some sort of structure to the midfield. The sub shouldn’t have been needed as the decision to play without a defensive midfielder was ridiculous in the first place. Given that, Luiz was the right sub in the second minute, the 42nd minute or the 72nd minute. He just shouldn’t have ever been dropped without a defensive midfielder to bring in.

Xg of 7.95 and he’s got 7 goals. Missed 2 he should have scored today. Has won us games with goals like the one at home to Brighton earlier in the season. Every single striker will miss chances. He’s 1 goal off what you’d expect him to have. The bigger issue for me is how a guy who has been playing up front for us for the whole season only has an expected goals return of 8. Hints at massive creativity issues all season.

That penalty goes in 100% of the time. I’m not sure what more you’d want from a penalty.

In what world is that a poor penalty?

I mean it was the perfect penalty but by all means choose to call it almost missing if you want.

He has to go for the far corner not just hit the target. Should be able to execute that finish though without doubt.

Do the media hate the fact he’s here or do they just wonder why he’d choose to sign here? At the moment we look very much like a team that talks big but can’t back that up with meaningful results on the pitch. Coutinho is likely to have his pick of a number of teams. I struggle to see how we’ll be the most attractive of those if this season continues in the same manner.

He gets zero service every week and our attempt to resolve the issues is to drop the only central midfielder we have who can actually reliably pass a ball. Is it any surprise he looked a different player for England?

I think the issue is that some players get repeatedly kicked with no yellow cards issued against them. If referees consistently yellow carded opposition players then they wouldn’t get booted for 90 minutes every week. Grealish and Hazard are the two that stand out for me as players who seemed to get kicked around and refs were scared to book those fouling them. It’s almost like they feel it’s inevitable that there’ll be a red card because the only way teams could stop them was to foul. I don’t think Saka was kicked around in that way though. He put himself in a pretty stupid position for that Mings pass which led to him taking a bit of a whack. Other than that I don’t really remember him taking any particularly rough fouls.

Then make it a news story when it is a news story. They're politicians, they lie. The scandal would be that Sunak was opposing sanctions against a company based on his wife's miniscule shareholding in it. The fact that he then lied about it wouldn't be that much of a shock to anybody would it?

His wife has a less than 1% stake in a company with some operations in Russia. I'm not sure he's digging himself any holes over that. To me its one (pretty small) step above throwing accusations at people who shop with brands or companies with links to corrupt regimes. Its a ridiculous line of questioning and it doesn't take more than a moment's thought to realise this. This government shouldn't need to be "set up". They appear to be amongst the most corrupt set of politicians that we've seen in this country. This isn't an example of it though in my opinion.

Couldn't agree more with this. There's enough questions to be asked of those in the current government without having to resort to ridiculous lines of questioning like this. I feel it detracts from the genuine corruption to make stupid accusations with no substance to them. I bet the Tories love being asked these sort of questions though. It makes it easy to avoid answering the serious allegations when you're being asked about easily refuted claims. Much easier to hide away the genuine questions/allegations when it becomes a bit of a witch hunt of throwing every accusation under the sun at people.

I kind of agree with this. However given that we’re in a pretty comfortable position we’re never going to have a better chance to try out a young talent than we do now. Ramsey hasn’t had his best games for us lately so bringing Carney on for him for 20-30 minutes wouldn’t have been the most ridiculous idea in these last few games. If we’re not going to give young players minutes in what’s left of this season then I can understand why they may feel they’re never going to break through here.

That’s the problem with VAR. It’s just as easy to manipulate decisions with it as without it. That penalty would be given on the pitch and confirmed by VAR every time at the other end of the pitch.

This. If football was as easy as pick the player with the most goals and/or assists in attacking positions and clean sheets in defence then we could have robots picking teams. Grealish had pretty average assists and goals stats for us for a lot of his time here. It didn’t stop him being head and shoulders above everybody else we had.

We’ve got a decent squad now. If you believe that that is the best we can hope to achieve against Arsenal then that’s fine. I’m not a football manager but this system of two number 10s and the full backs as our only width has led us to losses against such formidable teams as Newcastle, Brentford and Watford. That’s why I felt it wasn’t the right system. If our approach to a bit of bad form is to sack the manager and then replace the entire squad every season or two then we aren’t going about things in the right way.

I’d rather our manager wasn’t giving interviews like that to be honest. “I thought your questions would be a bit better”. It’s the sort of thing we’d rightly be calling out a Klopp or Guardiola as a bit of a prick for saying. Set your team up in a terrible system, lose the game and then act like a prick in the interview. Not a brilliant days work for Gerrard for me. I still don’t think we’ve got this system right. I still couldn’t tell you how we get it right in the summer without a ridiculous turnaround of players again.

A fair point. The game seemed to descend into utter chaos after the red card. Wolves were completely in control up to that point. I just find it infuriating how a ref can completely change a game. If it happened to us we’d all be raging so it’s only fair to acknowledge it when it happens elsewhere.

I’m not sure what he was supposed to do. Keeper comes sliding out and wins the ball and goes straight through him. Good old Kevin Friend couldn’t have got the yellow card out quicker though.

Oh I completely agree one decision doesn’t define a league season. However a 7 point gap from the bottom three is psychologically huge when compared to a 4 point gap. Thats three points Leeds have just been given by a ridiculous decision. I know everyone likes to think it evens itself out but I think just a simple look at Man United’s position in the league dispels that myth.

That red card decision would be pretty hard to take if you were a fan of one of the teams in the bottom three. There wasn’t even a challenge made and he’s got a second booking that could easily be what keeps Leeds up.

I find it quite difficult to even see F1 as a sport after how last season ended. When you’re making up rules to try to create a more dramatic spectacle it defeats the point of sport for me. The actual ending to last season was far more of a contrived drama than anything that a Netflix series could ever do.

We’ve played them twice in those 7 games. So we’ve played them over a quarter of the time. Good proof of how misleading stats can be though I guess.

They are 5-0 up and they’re going for three trophies. What do you expect them to do?