TWar

Trippier was incredible for them preinjury, Burn has massively improved their defence, and Bruno is a top player who is already showing his value. Wood has scored more goals since his first game for Newcastle than Broja in the league in the same timeframe so this "It's only Chris Wood" thing, he's done better than who we have up top. Targett is average, don't get me wrong, but who they had in that position before was dogshite so he was still a big step up.

Wonder if we'll slump all the way to 20th...

What are the differences between that tactic and the one we successfully employed against City, Spurs, and United earlier in the year? Also it was a 4222 not a 442. It clearly is a tactic that works when we are playing well, we just had a lot of players performing well well below their usual standards.

Like anyone could tell you we would finish 20th? A slump which has us still one point off 9th isn't much of a slump.

As an answer to the question. I'd have Pep, Klopp, Tuchel, Conte, Arteta, Moyes and Potter (maybe).

- Spends the most money in europe and more money than we have spent in the last 5 years - "but guys, it's just Chris Wood"

He had a nice turn on Rudiger and drive forwards. Would be interesting to see how he does against worse quality teams.

Part of the pathway I guess. Simeu has been doing really well in league 2 and will likely himself be in the Championship next season on loan. With any luck he steps up again after that.

Talk of being more active in the market, being able to break our £15m cap on transfer fees, talk of being able to do what we already do but better, and the fact we seem to be freezing out players who in previous seasons likely would just be offered new contracts. Will have to wait and see as nothing is guaranteed till it happens but I can see us spending a decent amount this summer. Even if we don't though, we have have a good young team with great young players like Salisu, KWP, and Tino and want to see how Ralph can improve them as well as bringing in more young players to replace some of our older dead weight.

I personally would be very annoyed if we finally got a bit of money to spend and a good core of young players and then the guy who the team was built around left. He's ment to be retiring in two years IIRC and that would suit me. Retiring now when we are on the up and about to spend would be a massive shame.

I'll rephrase, he can have as many bad runs/games as he likes if it keeps us safe, challenging top half, playing good football, and massively progressed from the crap we were when he arrived. It's a cliche, but one 6-0 is a tonne better than six 1-0s.

Pretty sure I've already answered this a bunch of times but the simple answer is he took a repeatedly relegation threatened team, spent the second least in the league, and turned it into a safe midtable team that has never had to worry about relegation since. Developing players from bang average relegation clonkers to some of the better in the league, just look at JWP. It's pretty simple really, that is a massive achievement and the odd really bad game doesn't erase that.

I think Everton will be very poor for a couple of windows atleast with ffp. Villa will likely have these issues soon too if they can't convert spending into more success.

Today was an abnormal game as a number of players who are arguably already above our level (jwp, romeu, salisu) played like absolute shite. This is somewhat unavoidable as we will probably not be able to improve on these players. I'm not bothered so much by one offs like this and am more interested in our more consistent issues. Statistically speaking our biggest gap is chance creation. Jwp is huge and ranks top 5 in the league but outside of him we are very average. Aside from that we still don't have a single forward who overperforms xG so our finishing is pretty crap too (again, aside from jwp). Finally our errors leading to goals is high, specifically our cbs so I think a good partner for salisu who is a cool calming presence could be good. New AM, new striker, new CB. This season Forster has been slightly above average which is fine, if he reverts to form from the previous season though we definitely need a keeper too.

If you are interested understat has an xg breakdown per chance. https://understat.com/match/16687 On the map stars are goals and circles are chances that didn't lead to goals. Click on one to see the xg, shooter, and minute of the game. Mounts first had a 4% chance of going in and was a very good finish.

Both our two 9-0s were pretty flukey from an xg perspective too.

Yeah, I mean, it happens with a massive differential in quality prem vs league 2 quality, but in the same league it basically never happens.

Yeah, I do. I think there were a couple of tap ins with 0.75 xg but there were also a couple of pretty tricky finishes, like Mount's first. I think confirmation bias makes people think chances go in a lot more often than they actually do. There were people on here calling what was likely a 0.25 xg chance for Armstrong a 0.8+ one against city. Its like I said at the time, people are far too liberal with "should be scoring that".

Or, alternatively, 10-0 results basically never happen for a reason.

Probably wise

xG was 4.4. This "different striker/goalkeeper" thing is bollocks. Overperforming xG by 6 would be basically unprecedented. They already finished way over average.

I dunno, there had been some suggestion we'll have a bit more money this summer

1 goal and 0 assists is not outstanding. Che was outstanding and was nominated for potm accordingly. Broja was fine.

Nonsense, Armstrong had 45 mins with no possession. No way can you say he was out of his depth based on that.

I think we do agree then, as hes good just not £40m good