Tommy Mulgrew

So it’s all your fault for taking the easy option. 😉

Arsenal willing to let Reiss Nelson go on loan for the rest of the season. HCDAJFU as a quick and lethal winger. But he might get more interesting offers from EPL sides. Certainly we could not afford more than a modest fraction of his £100+k per week wages. He’s 24 apparently.

Che manages to do quite a few air-kicks; he failed to make contact a few times today right in front of goal. That flatters his stats.

IIRC, the only others to have played LB are Bree and KWP. Bree gave space only occasionally, KWP a bit more often because he ventured further forward a lot. Manning does it every game he plays. I do not like the risk calculation RM has obviously made; it seems to me that only the opposing team’s failure to score repeatedly after having had the benefit of such a large amount of frequent open space delivered on a plate to them has stopped us dropping plenty more points than we have done. Better teams will give us a deserved thrashing if we go on like this. Fortunately, not many such teams play in the Championship. But it could be a real problem for us in our remaining fixtures this season. I prefer not to call out individual players but I shall be happy if Manning does not play again. Certainly, if we gain promotion, we shall have to correct our glaring deficiency at LB. I note that Walsall scored six away from home today against Grimsby, who I seem to recall beat us comfortably the last time we played them. Fingers crossed for this coming Saturday. 🙂

Despite having a penalty saved, West Ham win 2:0 at Arsenal. JWP looks to be MOTM yet again. Rice concedes the penalty. “Wish we were West Ham.”

Woody, why the apparent personal vendetta? Calm down, dear! 🤐

I think we all know that it is a deliberate tactic; it’s just that some of us on here think that we should not employ that tactic as often during a match as we seem to do. There are certainly times when we should condense play to gain an advantage and we should do so. But at other times we should be more conventionally wide in defence to minimise the chances of us conceding a goal. In recent matches our failure to do that has not caused us to draw or lose but, as Trousers has recently pointed out in a different context, past performance is not a reliable guide for the future. In our quest for automatic promotion we need to do everything that we can to get three points in every league game.

That reminds me of a game I watched at a stadium not far from the River Itchen earlier this season. 🤫 Vestergard doing his usual stuff in injury time - not that it helps us though: I think Leicester are going to stay top even though we might run them close. And nice to see Schumacher giving Rooney a roasting in Birmingham. Shame, too, about the Skates. COYFS

Watched on SwansTV on the Swans’ app. Excellent stuff and a very fair commentary (from Lee Trundle at al); very complimentary about our performance and took the trouncing well. Funniest part was when they said how versatile Joe Allen was - fouls with one foot and then the other. A real team performance. No one played badly. Standouts for me were Aribo, Edozie and Fraser. The Pilgrims must be fearing the worst for Friday. Onwards and upwards Happy and Saintglorious. 👏 👍

IMO Swansea and Norwich pose more of a threat than Plymouth and Walsall. So I’d keep our strongest available 11 for the former two and rest a few of our more delicate petals for the latter two. And hope they keep off the slosh over Christmas and New Year. Merry Christmas and a HNY to all our readers on this forum. xxx

Whew, what a cup tie. Saints never do it the easy way. Cracking game.

Scoring for fun and conceding few; whatever next? What are the possession and passes per match stats? That is what really matters to a Saints-led SR group team. Or maybe we are merely a few weeks behind Goztepe in learning the fast-tempo PB way.

Maybe DM did not express himself as well as he might have done. Perhaps he meant that occasionally we progress up the field rapidly, not leaving the oppo much time to re-set, and create plenty of chances to score and, more often, we seem to take too many sideways or backwards passes, thus allowing the oppo to get back into a formation that is difficult for our players to penetrate so we recycle the ball back to the CMs, CBS or GK and start the slow, plodding process all over again. That is boring, predictable stuff and we often seem to concede a goal while doing it and struggle to score ourselves. We all, surely, want to see much more of the former way of playing possession football, with slick, incisive passing and movement towards the oppo’s goal. The variation in our play does not, to me at least, depend on how the oppo team sets out to play against us. I do not know whether it comes from RM or from our players being good at playing occasionally and bad frequently or some other reason. I’d like to think that RM does not want us to play crab-ball and draw in preference to play incisively and win more often. Our players certainly want to win, score goals and not concede. The unbeaten run is great but how much better it would be if we could have converted some of the draws to wins? Given our advantages in £s and players over most of our Championship opponents, that is surely what we should be trying to do.

Why isn’t this thread on “the Muppet Show” forum?

Mine was a right old crone.

My mistake: you’re obviously his big sister.

You sound like Russ’s big brother; or his mum.

And humble, too, by all accounts. Top bloke. He’ll soon rival Maya Yoshida in my estimation if he stays another year or two.

Can’t complain about four goals but no doubt some will. We relentlessly destroyed them and they resorted to petulant strong-arm tackles late in the game. Nice almost backheel from Edozie; well taken chances by SA and SM, who were in the right place at the right time; ditto Charley, who I thought was just about offside when Smallone shot his pencil. P2 is by no means out of reach.

It’s on Dazn Canada and I’m in Canada at present so I’ll “turn up” a bit later. Hoping for a goal-fest. 3:1 to Saints.🤫

But, in our team, Bazunu has almost as many touches as Bednarek, who is consistently among the most frequent touchers of the ball we have. No jokes please.

So boring, frustrating and unsatisfactory. Slow, ponderous build-up play that almost guarantees 10 Coventry players behind the ball waiting for us to recycle the ball back into our half again and again. Possession for the sake of it and no goal threat whatsoever, except at the wrong end, where Manning leaves acres of space for the opposition to run into. When are we ever going to run at the opposition and make swift incisive passes to forwards running into spaces? If we continue playing like this we shall not get promoted in a million years.

Where’s Alexy - you know, Lawy innit - with his pressy summary? He’s never here when you want him to be and always is when you don’t.

Last sentence: why do you (and some others) continually have to be so aggressively antagonistic against many of our players? They play for the team we allegedly support.

1:1 after extra time and we lost on penalties. Good competitive game. We played Russball and did it well.