Laughable Chimp

I mean, if you're expecting 28-35 year olds to improve, then yeah that's kind of being dumb. Buut when people talk about the players we signed who didn't improve, we're specifically talking about the young players we signed who didn't, or at the very least didn't improve with us. And we've had a lot of them the past 5 years or so. Grealish is the one big exception to that regard, but we had quite a few prospects over the years that just never bloomed for us.

Is playing in an attacking position really a criteria for a high price anymore? I mean, look at how much Maguire and Van Dijk went for. Our own most expensive signing this season was probably a centre back. I say probably because of the potential to rise thing.

I remember him being Newcastle's only impressive player against us tbh.

Yeah, probably. The stats I have don't say exactly which game he played these formations under and I'm not gonna go check all the games one by one to find out. But we've played 4231 for a total of 175 minutes this season and 3412 for a total of 52 minutes. In the league of couurse.

He experiments with formations more than it seems. To date he's played 9 different formations for us in the league. In fact, we've actually played a 4231 and 3412 under him this season.(and the xGD stat suggests 3412 might be our best formation ignoring the very small sample size). 352 would probably be an option if Smith had any faith in our central midfield, which he clearly does not. The problem is most of these formation changes tend to come duuring the second half of a game when we're losing so we'll play under them for like, 20-30 minutes and then Dean goes back to the 4-3-3 or the 343 for the start of the next game. I also seem to remember that we were switching things up a bit even at the start of games when we were on that terrible run prior to the Burnley game. We were switching formations, but none of them were really working. Then we started the 343 against Burnley, it worked, and we were stucked with that formation for a while after that becase of it.

I'm pretty sure declaring this season to be void would be a lot more unfair to clubs that wouuld've been promoted this season and overachieving clubs like Sheffield United than it would be if clubs had to play in front of empty stadiums for a bit.

They aren't gonna declare this season null and void lol. Pigs will fly before that happens.

Uh, not sure what's your point here. I could blame the defenders for not being good enough. Bruh, I'm not a scout. Its not my job to find the best players for good money, its theirs. That said, do you honestly think this crop of players were the best we could've gotten with the money we had? Really? Because I'm pretty sure we could've gotten gems with the money we had, we got none(jury is out on Samatta but its a shame we had to wait until January to get him). ****'s sake, I'm sure there's a better striker out there than Wesley at 20m for example. What's the point of a player like Trezeguet, even if you argue that 9million we got what we paid for, at that point I'd rather keep Green and use it better rather than waste money watching his guy run around the pitch. Yeah, we're about to take a giant step back imo. Which no mistake, is very much a giant step back. Go look at the finances thread to see how dire I finances might look in the event of relegation and tell me more about how we're "rebuilding".Which I'm not denying, and they've done a good job with rebuilding us so far, but the fact of the matter is, they've seemed to stumbled at this step looking at where we're heading now and there's nothing wrong with admitting that instead of putting all the blame on the previous administrations.

You can judge them at the end of the season after they get us relegated.

The average price spent per player in the Premier League this season excluding loans and free transfers is actually 16mil so I think that 20-30mil figure is overstated. In general though, outside the top 6, I think most fans would treat signings beyond the 20mil range as important signings and not expect just some average PL player. In fact, 9 different PL clubs didn't even spend more than 20mil on a player this season, and that 16mil figure is mostly driven by the astronomical figures of the top clubs. It seems a bit odd to claim that 20-30mil is the average for a PL player when almost half the clubs in the leaguue never spent more than 20mil for a single player, implying that half the clubs in the league didn't even buy players that were expected to be average this season.

If youu compare every signing to Harry Maguire pretty much near any signing you make wouldn't look like a bad signing. You could do the opposite and compare to some transfer steals too and now every other transfer looks shitty.

We were decent with 3-4-1-2 in the very short time we've used that formation so far.

And Wesley got a cap at the same time. I still don't think that made him good. Smith also choose to give Drinkwater a couple of starts over Luiz, did that mean Drinkwater was better than Luiz? People can disagree with the manager's opinion on players youu know. They're both liable to be passengers for our teams so involved far more is a stretch and last I checked, Luiz successful tackle rate is 1 per game so not shy of making a challenge is pushing it. Conor can score goals too, he's actually 4 times better at it than Luiz in terms of minutes per goal just in the league itself. And also 4 times better in minutes per assist too. And this is before i include the amount of times he's been directly at fault for us conceding a goal. His age just indicates his potential, not his current ablity. Not that I'm even ranking Conor over Luiz at this point, I just disagree with the idea that he's miles ahead of him. Edit: Ah, I looked at Luiz's overall stats instead of juust 2019-20. Conor is 2 times better at goalscoring and 2 times the better assister after adjusting for that.

That'd be down to potential, not current ability.

Disagree

Trez runs his ass off too. He's just a shit footballer.

No that was a 3-4-3

We've only ever played 5 at the back for 107 minutes in the league and in that time we've scored 0 goals and conceded 6.

Edit: Ah, Bournemouth is in 18th place not Watford. In that case, its probably between Bournemouth and West Ham. Watford will pull away and Brighton will be just out of reach. Newcastle scrap just enouugh points to stay clear. Norwich to get a late run of form but its too late. Bottom 7 will be something like this. Brighton-42 Watford-40 Newcastle-39 Bournemouth-37 West Ham-36 Villa-34 Norwich-30

Atm he has the joint highest strike rate of any player in the Championship for any player who's at least played 300 minutes of football in terms of minutes per goal. Could maybe even hit 20 goals this season if he continues his current form. Edit: Actually, a near one goal per game rate wouuld put him at 19 goals by the end of the season.

I'm not convinced Jack is any better in the ACM role over LW.

I really like this guy.

Worse is a bit of an overstatement. Worst we've been under them at this stage of the season and not get relegated was in 14/15 when we were 19th with 22 points but so were 18th and 17th which depending on how you look at it is actually slightly better than our current state. We would very shortly after proceed to win a couple of games and puut distance between us and the bottom 3. Although that extra game in hand makes comparisons quite more complicated, I wouldn't say we've been worse in those seasons than we are right now.

Samatta looking more and more like the signing of our season. Shame we only got him in January..

Also, start changing things up earlier when you can see things aren't working. This is the one that gets me the most becauuse I can't see any logic behind it. Smith never makes any changes earlier than 60minutes unless he is forced to duue to njuuries. He saw Southampton were mauling us in the first half, and he proceeds to not change a single thing for the start of the second half.