qwertyell

Exciting game. Hard to feel anything other than cheated by a squad that only turns up when they know they're in the shop window. No sign whatsoever of this fight last week. Suspect we'll do the usual and down tools in the second half again. Alcaraz, Lavia, Bella-Kotchap excellent. Both full backs really poor.

Would be more of a shrug.

Doesn't matter - the players and fans did the moment they hired Jones. Too late to turn the tide now. Half the squad have already planned their escape and are just going through the motions.

Tough on the kid, everyone piling in on him. I've been a critic, but it feels a bit indulgent to keep on kicking him now. It's quite similar to the Mara signing - neither were ready to play at this level, and the expectation was that the club were shoring up some talents for the future and would be bringing in experienced first choices in goal and up front, and it just never happened. These guys have been dropped in at the deep end in key positions, in a shite team, and getting absolutely buried for the club's negligence. That being said, I just don't see anything special in Bazunu's make up that suggests he's got a ceiling much higher than he's already reached. Experience isn't going to stop him being relatively small for a keeper with a weak jump/dive.

Everton and Leicester are probably the two we want to take with us as it sounds like financially they'd both be in horrible trouble and fighting less for promotion than simply staying in business.

Doesn't matter who leaves. None of them will be a loss. They've shown how much playing for the club means to them. Rip it up and start again.

Weak from Maitland-Niles, garbage from Bazunu.

I think they're both a little flaky - too early to call a winner. Arsenal's run in looks harder, but City's schedule is more demanding.

Yes. We'll take £10m-£15m to somewhat break even, with his contract into its final year. Chump change for any PL club, and he'll have admirers in France, Spain, Germany and beyond at that price.

Shame about the late concession. The boys haven't disgraced themselves at all. Which makes you wonder where they've been for all the winnable games they've failed to turn up to this season. A draw's not out of the question in the second half - City are a flaky side at times. Come on lads, nothing to lose.

8 game ban for Mitrovic. First game back: Southampton (a). I mean, we'll already be down by then, but fucking hell - just our luck.

We've picked up 11 points in 15 games (45 available points) since Hassenhuttl belatedly left. We're on course for 29-30 points in total. We'll finish bottom. Deservedly.

If only he could've thrown on Vestergaard and Jonno Quick. Pretty sure you need a bit more than a single attribute to be any good. Our tallest and fastest players have thus contributed the grand total of fuck all. No goals. No assists. In spite of their impressive tallness and fastness. Unforgivable indeed.

What does that even mean? We've had three managers picking the "wrong side" this season. What exactly is the right side from this squad of slurry? Everyone that doesn't get selected suddenly becomes a theoretical world beater - until they get picked and it turns out they're not. It seems painfully obvious that we're just rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic at this stage. The quality isn't there, no matter how you configure it. Whether Selles is a long term bet as manager is a separate issue. But he's not doing any worse than his predecessors this season, which suggests the problems don't begin or end with who the manager is.

1-0 in the book will look like a tight defeat, like we were perhaps a bit unlucky, but honestly we barely laid a glove on them. As expected. What else is there to say? There's no one single issue that, if resolved, will turn the ship around. The players aren't good enough for the premier league. Some of them won't be good enough for the championship.

Predictably dreadful. West Ham aren't much better. Just nothing there. Weak defence. Anonymous midfield that is neither destroyer nor creator. And the shittiest attack this side of Shitsville. We're not staying up. Won't even be close in the final shake up.

Premier League relegation: Nine teams in danger of dropping to the Championship - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/64985188 73% chance of going down. Red hot favourites - the next worst side only have a 55% chance of relegation. According to this, anyway. Hard to dispute the bottom line though.

I think the recovery time from shoulder surgery is quite lengthy, though. IIRC Theo Walcott was out for about four months when he had it done at Arsenal. The club hedged their bets with Bella-Kotchap and crossed their fingers that his dislocation was a freak one off. But as it seems like there's a big weakness there now, it'll have to be fixed. Don't expect to see him again this season.

No, Prutton received a 10 game ban.

Even when we were 3-1 down I didn't think the team deserved to get trashed today - they played pretty well, in spite of having to deal with one of the best attacks in Europe with one CB for 70mins. The late penalty was a farce - the ref wouldn't have gotten out of there alive if it'd been the other way around - but I think we earned a bit of luck with the guts we showed. This game won't be the reason we go down. But the details - three goals conceded from three shots on goal - are certainly a massive contributory factor: we can't expect to limit sides to zero shots on target, and we can't expect to have to score twos and threes every week to get something from matches. Nice cameos from the subs for a change. Mara, Sulemana and Alcaraz will be good players in a few years. Probably for someone else, though. Can't complain about the fight shown. At this stage, that's all most of us hope for - don't go down with a whimper.

0-1 h/t. To be honest, I thought we played okay in the circumstances - losing both CBs is a massive blow, even if one of them is Bednarek. The goal is on Elyounoussi. Perraud has to cover his man, Kulusevski, moving inside. Perhaps he could've hedged his bets. But if the opposition full back is in that much space, it means your wide midfielder hasn't tracked him. On the injuries, I assume Bella-Kotchap's dislocated shoulder is the same one his dislocated earlier in the season. The club had a choice then whether to operate or hope he could manage it, and looks like we again made the wrong decision. You'd think there's no way back from here, but Spurs haven't been special and we've gotten into some decent positions. But there's no quality. At all. Walcott's pace has gone, so his fairly bright movement off the ball is rendered moot once he gets it and can't motor away from anyone. We've only got one more substitute window unless we get someone on at h/t. What to do? Lose, probably.

He's only been here 9 months. It's a waste of time people getting upset about the "wrong" attackers being picked. An attacker hasn't scored a league goal for us since November. There are no "right" options. It's just rearranging lumps of shit on the Titanic. This is a relegation squad. That's all there is to it.

Not a fucking chance we get seven shots on target.

He's emblematic of a transfer policy dictated by people who have all the statistics but no actual football knowledge. There was no joined up thinking behind his signing. We tried to sign Vitinha from Braga, who is quick, agile, aggressive and skillful. And when that didn't work out we switched our attention to Onuachu, who is the direct antithesis of those attributes. Stylistically, they couldn't have been more diverse. There was no plan. No thought behind how he'd fit into our squad or how suitable he'd be in this league. It was pure panic by a bunch of fucking amateurs who are convinced they've "solved" football on MS Excel. Might go okay in the Championship, if we're lucky...

Last 8 in the league: 1 goal from open play. 3 in total. Last 10 in the league: 0 goalscorers who aren't midfielders Ward-Prowse or Alcaraz. Just appalling attackers. Worst in the league. Added Mara, Edozie, Sulemana, Onuachu to Adams, Armstrong, Walcott and Elyounoussi, at a cost of around £70m and have gotten worse. About £100m we've spent on that shite all in. Edit: I forgot we also signed Croatia's number three Mislav Orsic impersonator.