Laughable Chimp

We persisted with Drinkwater for several games and I can't imagine he looked impressive in training(unless you count giving an impressive headbutt to Jota). Like any manager, Smith has his favorites. Barkley is one of them and will continue to be given chances to prove himself. El Ghazi wasn't, and as soon as it felt like his purple patch may be over he has never started for us again. If you notice something, it is absurdly difficult for certain players on our squad to maintain a spot in the starting lineup, no matter how well they play in the few starting chances they get.

The longer this season goes on, the more we start to play like how we did last season. Only reason we're still picking up points now is that we have better quality players. Emi has been saving our asses and Watkins is able to keep banging in the occasional goal. Which is particularly important considering all our striker options last season. I want to praise Grealish too but I feel like he's been a lot more ineffective these last couple of games. People say that its because they're doubling up on Grealish but they've always been doing that. They've been doing that since last season. I don't know whether Grealish's increased ineffectiveness is a result or a cause of our current play style but whatever it is, we're clearly not playing anywhere near how we did at the start of the season where we were dominating games. A friend of mine who's pretty analytical about football was watching the game with me. And he noticed that we were leaving space in front of us for Brighton to play in. I feel like that's a complaint you frequently heard last season of us.

If Bournemouth can get 25m from us for Mings on the back of half a good season in the championship after being crocked for years, we can get more than 5m for a midfielder who's scoring a goal a game. I believe the Swansea manager even said he couldn't believe Conor was available. I think there's enough suitors out there for Conor for him to go for more than 5 million.

If he's being let go by **** Sheffield United, he probably isn't good enough for us

Huh. Wesley's goals were all of the same kind. Really close to the goal that they're borderline tap ins all with his right foot. Watkins scores those kinds of goals yes but he scores all kinds of goals too. Whether it'd be long-shots or tap ins. With his head or either feet. Whether he first receives the ball in the box or has to dribble it a bit.

Still kind of meh on the kid. Best praise I can give him is that he didn't look out of place but I'd be lying if I said I'd saw anything impressive yet. Think some people are giving too much credit on the couple of shots he's had. He didn't really take any of them that well to my memory.

Was looking through Barkley's attempted tackling stats and saw that his season with us so far is indeed an anomaly in this regard. He's been averaging 0.8 attempted tackles per 90 this season for us, far below the average amount of attempted tackles he's put in at other seasons for Everton and Chelsea. If we assume that attempted tackles could be some kind of proxy for aggresion or work rate, it at least tells us his lethargic play for us right now is not how he usually has been before.

Nah, disagree. We had less posession yes, but I feel like that masks how well we played against Arsenal. We only had 2 shots less than them and we were definitely close to scoring at least one more goal. Traore for example should've scored whilst Arsenal rarely actually seriously tested Martinez.

Nakamba has a higher passing accuracy than Luiz for this season and last season. You could argue Luiz is better at long ball passing, but their short passing stats are near identical. I don't think Nakamba loses the ball as much as people think.

Didn't he go bankrupt, or am I thinking of someone else?

Me wanting to criticize Luiz and seeing the swarm of Villatalkers defending their boy

Man, I just would like to see Villa play in Europe, no matter the competition.

I'm still not convinced Drinkwater wasn't matchfit. He was with Burnley for months and aside from that one month injury layoff, surely he'd been training with them to regain his match fitness? Was he just twiddling his thumbs not doing anything on the training ground? Then he comes here and people act like he hadn't been on a pitch for 6 months. I think he was just crap and Smith starting Drinkwater for a couple of games was less to do with trying to help him regain his match fitness and more a desperate attempt to try and fix the midfield before being eventually forced to accept the conclusion that he was indeed just crap and then never played him again, not even as a sub. At that point of the season, our central midfield looked pretty gash so any one new coming in would've looked like a sight for sore eyes.

There was a guy on reddit who analysed on average when each Premier League team brings on their first second half sub. We were last place, waiting until the 74th minute on average to use our first second half sub. There also didn't seem to be any kind of correlation between this and the league position of teams in the table.

We're 2 points of 6th place. I think its clear we're already challenging for top 6 this season. 2/3 good signings would get us challenging for top 4.

Like I said in the Conor thread, it feels like Barkley and Conor are very similar players. And like with Conor, I do feel the need to defend Barkley here. I think there's definitely a place for players like Hourihane and Barkley. Even if their work rate is poor, their goal and assist threats will always be vital when we need a goal. I agree though, he's not a massive improvement over Conor and I feel like we may be able to do better with 30m.

Thing is, what slightly concerns me is that I've seen Brentford fans say he was never the best finisher in his Brentford days too. Looking at his penalty record, might just be a composure issue. Its the only part of his game where I can point a flaw in. If we trust xG, he has the second highest xG in the league so far, only behind Jamie Vardy. If he can improve his finishing he could truly turn into a world class striker. Right now he has all the tools though.

I thought he was one of our poorer players today but that's less an indictment of him and more me praising the rest of the team. I do think he should have lost his status as one of Smith's unsubbables by now though. He's not as pivotal to the team as he once was and we can afford him to rotate him and out more. Might be beneficial to give him more of a rest too.

If Traore doesn't know what he's doing, the defender sure as hell doesn't.

We've opened it up quite a bit of a gap between us and the rest of mid-table with this win. Only team below us in danger of catching up with us in the immediate future is Spurs. Arsenal are 4 points behind with 2 games played more than us and then the next team after that is Leeds who are 6 points behind us with the same amount of games played. Meanwhile, if we win our game in hand we could jump straight up to fifth.

Genuinely can't critique him this time. Absolutely immense and I don't use that term lightly.

How exactly is Barkley comfortably a better player than Conor? They're both useless defensively and feel anonymous most of the gsmr so its pretty much a wash there. Stats wise, offensively Conor had a better assist per minute ratio last season than Barkley in his peak Everton season and his goals per minute ratio isn't much worse either. Not that this is anywhere near peak Barkley mind you

What's the source on PCL injuries taking a lot longer to recover from?

If you're looking at average amounts of yellow cards per 90 for DMs, the ranking in the Premier League is something like this. If we include a minimum playing time of 300 minutes as a starting DM to qualify, the list from highest to lowest is. 1-Harry Winks 2-Jake Livermore 3- Kalvin Phillips 4-Wilfried Ndidi 5- Nampalys Mendy 6- Rodrigo 7- Dani Ceballos 8- N'Golo Kante 9- Thomas Partey 10- Fred 11- Paul Pogba 12- Pierre-Emille Hojberg 13- Moussa Sissoko 14- Douglas Luiz 15- Joao Moutinho 16- Tomas Soucek 17- Granit Xhaka 18- Nemanja Matic 19- John Mcginn 20- Youri Tielemans 21- Declan Rice

I missed the game so this is a genuine question, but why are people saying we lost the game in midfield when we had more posession than West Ham?