stevegrant

It would be interesting to know what White's job description entails, really. Assuming he has no input on selection or coaching, considering I think we've only signed Ben Brown in the last two years (which rather fell into our lap because of his situation at Sussex), what is he actually doing? Tough decisions should have been made about certain individuals for the good of the team. We moved Lewis McManus on to Northamptonshire seemingly at the drop of a hat because we felt his batting wasn't up to scratch, and got Brown in, so it suggests that the sometimes-brutal decisions can be made. If Joe Weatherley isn't going to be playing first XI cricket, he should be out on loan in Division 2 getting games against proper bowlers, same with the likes of Aneurin Donald and Mason Crane. We also seem to have an absolute fuckton of white-ball-only players: from the squad page on the club website, it's Ellis, Howell, McDermott, Whiteley and Wood. That's a LOT of salary cap being used on players who aren't eligible for the County Championship.

It's still there, but eventually there was always going to come a point where the bowlers couldn't bail out the failing batsmen. With Abbas, Abbott and Barker in the team, if one had a slight off day it could be absorbed by the other two. With Barker out injured, we're now relying on Fuller (fast and hostile but erratic) and Holland (nagging line but often ineffective) picking up the slack of a guy who got 50+ wickets last year. Throw in a continued failing top order plus the usual bailout all-rounders pissing their wickets away on day one, and it's not a great combination. If Organ isn't going to bowl, what's the point in him being in the side? Even Joe Weatherly looked more likely to score runs, Toby Albert got a double hundred for the 2s the other day, so we've got alternatives there. Or we stick Holland back up the top of the order again as another sticking plaster once Barker is fit again. For a supposedly ambitious and forward-looking county, it's insane that we didn't go out and try to sign a new opening batsman in the winter. It was so obviously the weak point in the team last year, probably the sole reason we didn't win the title given the difference in batting bonus points earned.

Morning session was pretty good, Middleton and Gubbins were watchful but took advantage of anything slightly off line, but after lunch the Warwickshire bowlers were a lot tighter with their lines, which brought a flurry of LBWs early in the afternoon. We managed to get a couple of useful partnerships going but both Holland and Fuller gave their wickets away - Holland with a half-hearted pull which ended in the hands of Briggs on the deep fine leg boundary, and Fuller stupidly ran himself out going for a quick single that was never on. Felix Organ again failed, is he going to be our Zak Crawley? Only really works if we're still winning games in spite of his lack of contributions...

They did commit to continuing to finance the women's setup at that fans forum, tbf. The women's game does seem to suffer from a hell of a lot of dead rubbers from quite an early stage of the season - I get that with the huge budget disparity within single divisions, you'll end up with some lopsided tables at times, but they've surely got to have more teams shifting up and down each year. There are still 20% of all the games to play in the Championship, and yet there's really only two teams with anything realistically to play for. Coventry are just about still alive at the bottom but having lost 16 of their 18 games, it seems far-fetched to suggest they'll win all their remaining 4 to have a chance of staying up. If it was two down to the National League, three additional teams would still be involved right now, and if it was two up to the Super League, perhaps with one automatic and then a 4-team playoff, the season is actually still alive for everyone.

Nathan Redmond had bundles more end product than any of the wide players we currently have at our disposal.

But, as ever, it's not actually as simple as that. We've shown fairly decent aptitude against teams whose main intent is to attack us - Chelsea, Man United, Leicester to an extent - but struggled against teams who set up more conservatively. Especially at Old Trafford at the weekend, and in the first halves against Chelsea and Leicester, there wasn't a whole lot of boring or slow anything. We played at a good tempo and created a fair number of chances against both sides. We won at Chelsea and could easily have done so at Man United. The issue is how we break down teams who sit very deep and deny any space in the channels. Our crossing isn't good enough to exploit wide areas - Perraud got into loads of good positions last night but so many of his crosses ended up going straight into David Raya's arms, which was infuriating as he's generally one of our better players in that regard. When teams pack the defensive block, there aren't many sides who are good at picking holes through the middle (City probably the only ones, really, and even then we've found success against them in the past by simply overcrowding them within the width of the penalty area) so you then get forced into wide areas, which is where you need a) the delivery to be of a high standard, and b) enough targets in the penalty area capable of getting on the end of those deliveries. Under Ralph in the first half of the season, we probably had the deliveries covered, but didn't get enough players into the box to convert, and when we did get chances we missed them (that Newcastle game is still infuriating after basically missing two open goals); now we've probably just about got enough players in there, especially last night, but the quality of the delivery and - in fairness to the wide players - movement wasn't up to it. Brentford weren't any great shakes last night, IMO, but they had studied our weaknesses from wide set pieces where everyone gets drawn to the near post leaving ourselves short-staffed at the back post, and having given us a couple of warnings we still didn't take the hint and they scored from the third such opportunity.

So creative that he has *checks notes* zero assists. An "expected assists" figure of 0.3 over the entire season. He ranks below Mohammed Salisu and Armel Bella-Kotchap on this metric.

Pretty amusing that Arsenal have been to St Mary's twice in that period and haven't managed to win