Rob182

He was relegated with Notts County. But yeah, the common opinion, for some reason, is that he’s never managed a team that’s been relegated.

Add Bennett and Shorey and that’s 4 players in his own position alone that are all worse, and most of whom cost more than him!

Antonio and Coufal here. I too have no Chelsea or Leicester players. There’s something about those two teams that puts me off. Maybe it’s their blue kit!

No way. We’ve signed way worse players than Luna. I could name ten off the top of my head.

I’ve read that one. Spoiler: It’s Christopher Samba.

Bamford and Alioski are on my bench. Obviously planned to have doubles but it was a step too far to replace them as well as the other 3 changes I made this week. I’ve only got one more single and that’s Holding, who should do okay.

I took a -8 like many others. I’ve bench boosted and have 12 doubles. My main reason for going with the BB now instead of 26 or another week, is that I’m lead to believe that in the next one the European competitions will be back on, so there’s more chance of rotation. De Bruyne captained.

Oh yeah, I’m not put out at having 9 for the BGW, but like a few others, I have a couple of players that probably won’t get me more than a point (Brewster etc), so it’s more like 7. It’s all about GW19 for me though. Bench boost with 11 players who have 2 games, plus Son, Calvert Lewin, Brewster and Holding.

Son was where my captaincy was. The double-GW will be tricky. Salah looks like a good pick, but recent blanks will really put people off. I’ve been planning the blank and double game week since halfway through December. I’m sure plans will see me fall flat on my face though. That’s normally what happens when overthinking! I used up my free hit months ago, so I only have 9 players playing in the blank GW.

I’m so glad I didn’t captain Salah this week. My midfield heavy side finished on 86 points this week. Son, Fernandes, Salah (sigh), De Bruyne and Soucek sorted me out.

£40m Joelinton, £20m 100-year-deal for Callum Wilson. The poor bargain hunters

It’s very easy for Bruce supporters to say that Bruce is doing a better job simply because he has more points than Benitez had at this point in the season, but that only paints about 1/10th of the picture. Any team under Bruce will go backwards as time goes on. Overly reliant on big money signings and individual moments of brilliance, while the rest of your players get stuck into non-tactics for as long as he’s in charge. Young players generally suffer in their development, unless they’re one of the best ones, in which case they’ll have weight on their shoulders to produce individual moments to change games. Each year that goes by is another year of wasted money, terrible football, lack of development and a year closer to his older, trusted players declining and needing replacing.

It's such a good management formula. 1) No coaching. 2) Set the team up defensively and just tell the best players "Go on son!" 3) Scrape draws and wins, and disguise it as a masterplan. 4) Occasionally throw 4 strikers on (with no plan), and when it inevitably fails, say "See, this is why I play defensive football. The players aren't good enough to play tippy tappy Barca football. Wor just have to roll our sleeves up" Repeat, repeat, repeat.

I don’t think I believe it. Who would cash out at 4-1 when another goal for either side still would have kept the bet alive and the game was clearly full of goals.

I don’t think it’s a journos obsession with a celebrity that’s stopping them from asking the difficult questions, it’s just that they want to stay on their good side so that they will willingly talk to them openly (or as ‘openly’ as they do) the next time that journo wants an interview.

We do, but let’s just take a step back and remember that we only got promoted last season. To have wide options of Grealish, Trez, Traore and El Ghazi (from best to worst) isn’t terrible for a club in our position. El Ghazi is probably only going to get a few games while we have an injury crisis or during this busy Christmas period.

I think the real question would be whether they could agree a wage and length of contract that both would be happy with. I reckon a Forest team firmly in a relegation battle would be more than happy to bring back a talented midfielder who scored buckets of goals from midfield for them.

I wonder if he'd be interested in terminating his contract with us to go and help his old club Forest. I know he's not a Forest fan, but he played his best football there and might feel like it would be a good return. (Although, he does seem like he's happy being a non-footballer nowadays)

Don’t you mean Totten ham?

I can't imagine their owners have any money to give Big Sam in January, so I fully expect him to bring in 2 or 3 of the following on loan: - Andy Carroll - Danny Drinkwater - Craig Dawson - Fikayo Tomori - Phil Jones "Bring in some real men to sort us out!"

It's the same as the "players that haven't scored for ages always score against us" stuff that people say. It's not true and happens just as much to other teams, we just remember the ones that happen to us and the new manager first matches that happen to be against us.

Are Bayern showing interest the same way that Milan ‘showed interest’ in Nigel Reo Coker? I’ll believe it if it happens. We’d all love us to have players that are brilliant technically and also man mountains that can battle, but it’s just not realistic. Look at Paul Pogba. Man Utd thought they’d brought in a creative player that can score and is also 6ft3 and up for the fight. He’s a useless passenger in most of their games. How much did he cost? If we just want a tall body for certain games then we’d honestly be better just shoving a defender into midfield and seeing how that pans out. Shove Engels or Hause in Dougie’s place for starters, before we go forking out £30m for a player to allow us to play against Smith’s usual plan, just for when we play West Ham or Burnley.

That’s got nothing to do with the players available though. That’s a coaching decision for how we should mark from set pieces. I always see you wishing that we had a big unit in midfield, but unless you’re spending mega money to get someone who is defensively solid as well as creative, then we would undoubtedly lose the fluidity that we currently have in attack. Is that worth it, for the sake of what? Having a little bit more steel in midfield, and maybe winning an extra couple of headers from set pieces? So we’d probably score and concede fewer. I’d rather Smith concentrates on his style that he’s played and honed for years, a style based around attack. Instead of doing what Lambert did and completely changing the way he likes to play to concentrate more on defence than anything else. Personally I’d rather we just tightened up with better tactics and coaching at set pieces (man marking, for a start), before we just say “we need a tall guy in the middle”.