tajjuk

This, most injuries in the league, shit decisions going against us (two games in a row btw). I mean lets be honest better Refs in the last two games and we'd have 3 points against Villa and we'd be nowhere near 9-0, people say the players folded, but how would your confidence be playing Man Utd in form, with that prick Dean giving them literally everything going? I'd want to fucking give up, I mean that offside goal ffs, you fight back to score a goal with 10 men and FOR THE SECOND WEEK, shit VAR use robs it from you. It was 12 vs 11 from the start, then 12 vs 10 then 12 vs 9, losing fight in those circumstances is understandable IMO. It was a shitstorm of bad luck all round, I mean what the kid is doing, is that basically his fuck you to the club for not granting his transfer request? Because honestly that one needs to go because his attitude is clearly all wrong. Again it's how we recover from here but we need players back on the pitch, hope they are appealing that stupid red straight away.

I'd say more likely we had two players for that position in Redmond and Djenepo, and he was more signed for Armstrong's side where we didn't really have any cover (hence why Smallbone was getting played there I think despite looking more clearly like a centre-mid). It's just Redmond has been well below even his inconsistent best and Djenepo seems to be made of cheese strings. So I feel its a position we need to upgrade really, of course money is tight but I'd like to see sign basically a Redmond upgrade and a no.10 with a bit of craft to challenge Armstrong and help us unlock deep defences easier, like Ozil like player, so hopefully Lookman is someone we might be looking at in the summer, especially if Fulham go down.

Sometimes players just don't come through, happens to all clubs, not sure its a systematic thing though there are probably certain things that could be done better and I am sure those are things that Crocker etc. are looking at. But like how many top talents have come through at say Liverpool between like Gerrard and TAA? Sterling maybe and they stole him In 2018-19 we we third for total amount of minutes played by academy produced players across the PL, behind Spurs and Man Utd, we were also third in 2017-18 In October 2020, we were again third with 13 youth products in the PL, behind Man Utd and Chelsea I think we also regularly appear high up in the youth minutes rankings as well, with chances given to home grown players. So I am not sure 'broken' is exactly right.

£50 -70k a year is at least one possibly two up and coming prospects from Europe or maybe the Championship, we know finances are tight, I think every ounce of our wage budget has to go to direct improvements on the squad, is he that? I don't think so and he is only likely to get worse. That sort of wage is something you could be offering someone like Lookman who probably is at least at Theo's level if not better as he has impressed in with Fulham this year and we know he has excelled under Ralph, and could potentially become much better. Would people want to sign him if we then couldn't free up the wages for someone like that? Or another Ings type signing where it's a loan to buy and would need similar wages? for a fairly inconsistent, pacey, 31 year old who works hard and is a nice guy around the place but who's final product is quite meh and haven't we just shipped out a hard working, pacey, nice guy around the club, who is probably on £50-60k a week and very clearly shouldn't have been given a new two year contract. I feel with Theo we'll be in a similar situation in 2022 looking for someone to take some of his final wages for a year probably in the championship

Was very highly rated before he joined pool, was seen as some sort of top bargain for the fee they got him for because he was starring for Salzburg in the champions league but just doesn't seem to have worked out for him there, tough bunch of players to get ahead of, especially as Klopp despite moaning about too many games and not enough subs, barely actually ever rests Mane or Salah, and they don't pick up many injuries, then Jota came in as well and was on fire immediately so he dropped further down the pecking order. Hopefully if he does well and I think me might, we have a shout of signing him permanently, by the reports it seems we want an option to buy but pool said no, but if the player settles and does well I can see him pushing for a transfer for more football much like Ings did. Liverpool will attempt to fleece us though so we'll have to see how the finances are holding up, hopefully by the summer we are looking to a full season with fans back and the club can open the purse strings a little.

Probably a no from me, he's been poor up front and has only really performed in that wide role from the left, but is pretty much as inconsistent as everyone else we try there. We need someone better, that position needs an upgrade as IMO it's been one of the weakest this year. Both strikers have performed well (but we need competition), Romeu, JWP and Diallo have all been good in the middle, Armstrong has been good (but again needs competition), Vestergaard has stepped up at the back and Bednerak has been consistently solid, Stephens is a decent enough back up and we have the unknown quantity of Salisu. Both full backs have been good (but again we need depth). But that wide left position no one has nailed a place or performed consistently there, so to me it seems the most obvious first team slot we should be looking at. Maybe Minamino is the answer and we might sign him permanently (lets be honest he's not getting in that pool front 3/4 unless they sell 2 of them and he might push to leave for football much like Ings did). Personally I'd not sign him (Walcott) because of age and wages and because he's not really an upgrade on Redmond, he's done better than Redmond this season but not that much better, I'd even say sell Redmond, keep Djenepo to see if he can find some consistency and actually stay fit for a run of games, and try and upgrade that position. As someone mentioned above, Lookman has impressed for Fulham and impressed under Ralph before so he could be an option (especially as Fulham are likely to go down)

I presume Spurs want Rose wages off their books, but he's on high wages, so people won't take them and I doubt he'll voluntarily drop his wages just to make things easier for Spurs seeing as they have basically frozen him out.

Owner lets football people run the club, football people fuck up and make bad expensive signings and this makes us struggle financially (and then we have massive Covid impact on finances on top), owner then replaces football people with better football people, who make better signings, but owner is still bad, doesn't really make any sense. If owners get involved in clubs too much and change too much fans complain, now we have fans complaining the owner is bad because he doesn't get involved enough, you couldn't make it up. Basically it seems if you don't throw money into a football club then you are a bad owner, which means most of the clubs in the PL have bad owners. Honestly some people, and I'd include Newcastle fans in this, because Ashley is nowhere near as bad as made out to be, need a reality check and need to go look at like Bury etc. I believe Basingstoke, who are a local club to here have basically had their ground sold by their owner to get turned into some sort of development even though it has a covenant on it saying it has to be used for football for the next 50 years but this means they have no home ground to play on, people need to get some perspective what an actual bad owner is, someone who lets the club run itself and doesn't interfere in football decisions is above average on the scale of football owners IMO. Yeh it would be good if we had more investment to push on this season and yes sadly I think this may be an opportunity missed, but it is what is, we could be a lot worse off and a lot of clubs are.

Grealish is on about £120k a week and that was only signed in September so they have only been paying that for about 5 months, no way Mings is going to be on more than JWP or Ings or Forster for example, reports say he's on around £65-70k a week, which is more than in line with our top earners. Reportedly we have offered Ings more than our previous highest wages which are around £70-80k a week, so likely we are offering close to if not the £100k a week figure. Villa's wage bill for the 19/20 season was just 23.8 million, ours was nearly £60 million, more than double and we have added new contracts to JWP and Romeu to that, plus the wages of Diallo, Salisu and KWP, whilst struggling to move the high earnings of Forster, Lemina, etc. Very clearly even with new signings and Grealish's new contract, Villa have got way more room in their wage budget than us and would have been making more profit from the TV deal than us, all newly promoted PL clubs benefit from this for a few years in the league if they stay there because their wage budgets are still basically championship ones. As for West Ham, they spent less than us in the summer, and have their own dead weight problems. so again I don't see the comparison. Barely any clubs are spending big at the moment anyway. We are perfectly fine being run sustainably and improving the squad IF we didn't F up so many recruitments. The failures of Hoedt, Lemina, the decline of Forster after getting a massive contract, Carillo, giving Long a new contract bizarelly, Elynoussi etc. are like dead weights on our finances, further squezzed by Covid, we are likely still paying a good proportion of those players wages, last year we were pretty much spamming about £12-15 million a year on players we were not using and haven't been able to recoup much transfer value from, whereas someone like Leicester have been able to successfully sell a player for big money each year to re-invest in the squad and keep improving (Mahrez, Maguire, Chillwell), like we used to do, before we started mucking it up. I don't know where you expect this miracle owners from, even Liverpool and Man Utd are run sustainably, they just make more money than us, hence why Liverpool are buying a Preston centre back not splashing on a £40 million one. Even Abramovich is reigning it in, they only spent this much this year because they sold Hazard for like over £100 million and then got a transfer ban. Add in FFP which is basically designed to stop sugar daddy clubs from spending, I don't know where you expect this investment to come from and what it's going to be able to achieve in the confines of FFP, we can only increase our wage budget by something like 6% each year or something and we've got so much deadwood draining our budget that we can't sell. Plus you have to wonder how much we wasted sacking managers and their staff before Ralph arrived as well. The poor decisions all round between like 2017 and Ralph arriving is the problem, bad signings, bad managers, bad contract renewals have hamstrung our finances.

Villa have only been in the league for like 18 months, so will still have loads of players on Championship wages, they won't have signed a raft of new contracts. We have been in the Prem for ages and pay PL wages, and to keep people like JWP, Bednerak, Romeu etc. you generally have to give them even bigger wages. They just sold Haller for like £20 million. This season they have spent around £50 million and sold around £40 million. Until they signed Benrahma, we had spent more than them this season and had sold less......

It' not VAR, its the fact you have Refs running it interpreting things, like drawing arbitrary lines on the pitch for offsides and choosing frames when the ball is played, that is the problem. As far as I can see basically you have Ref's making mistakes and other refs desperate not to show them up. Those two incidents last night were first and foremost poor ON FIELD decisions, he should have been giving a penalty for that because even with like multiple replays the touch on his thigh was not clear cut, so the on field ref should have been giving that as it was a clear handball blocking a shot with the arm moving into the path of the ball. But because he failed at his job, VAR, as in the other ref operating it, then desperately looked for something to back up his bad decision. Had he given that as a pen, as he should have, there is NO WAY they would have overturned it. Same with the offside, the lino mucked up, there is no way from his angle he is seeing a sleeve offside and he's mucked up, so again they fall over themselves to confirm a bad decision, so the lines get drawn with the benefit going to it being offside, and the frame chosen is the one AFTER the ball has left the foot as you can clearly see in the screenshot, so that then enables them to very very marginally support their colleagues muck up. That is the problem, its a refs union, they won't over turn their own mistakes and won't highlight muck ups most of the time. The principal of VAR is fine, it should be there for fixing glaring errors, like that handball, that is a glaring error by the ref, there is no way the ref saw a deflection of his thigh because multiple Sky cameras and 3 people in the studio couldn't see it. So should have been giving a penalty and VAR should have said, no you made a mistake go look at it again or give a pen, but they don't. The offside thing again, they can't do this like the ball crossing the line. The ball crossing the line is done by machines and is very accurate down to the cm, but they are trying to apply the same principle to offsides when there are many moving parts and it can't be done, the person is drawing the lines on, so there has to be some common sense applied.

You know we do that on purpose yeh, its an attempt to draw the opposition out to create space and then quickly get the ball forward between the lines.

It's not VAR though is it, its the failure of the people operating it, its still people basically interpreting the rules on a whim as far as I can tell.

Reports now Everton and Leicester sniffing around. It's honestly such a same we don't have any money, because I think if we could have secured a couple of quality players in Jan (I know always a gamble) even for only like the standard £15 million (which I think with covid prices would probably get you more than it would a year or two) and we could really be pushing those top places with the way the league is. Yeh we are 10th but we are only 5 points off 4th with a game in hand, this is a huge opportunity to take advantage of the slackness of the likes of Arsenal and Chelsea (and the dropped standards of the likes of City and Liverpool) to really push into those top 6 and maybe even those top 4 places and then I doubt this contract situation with Ings would be as troubling. How we do over these next 20 games could define the club for the next 4-5 years sadly and I just worry we don't quite have enough to maximise it, we're picking up injuries and players are getting tired with no enough quality replacements about.

That to me sounds like he wants his cake and wants to eat it. He wants the safe comfy option of a long contract here as one of our highest earners PLUS the ability to just jump relatively easily to champions league club. Whereas yes he could leave for free in the summer of 2022, but who knows could have had a big loss of form or a long term injury and is then struggling around to find a good contract for a 30 year old with a history of injuries.

It is depressing, just when we were building something.

It's getting worrying now, I reckon we are going to end up selling him in the summer and probably not for a huge amount considering the global pandemic and a year on his deal. Someone I reckon will be getting a bargain I reckon if there are takers. Let's hope the club has been scouting replacements for a while.

Still a shame we missed out on Maddison, does appear from stories we were very close to signing him and he's exactly the goalscoring/clever passing no.10 I feel we miss (plus under ralph you'd suspect maybe he'd be even better). We played well, lost to a good finish, whilst missing several key players whilst Leicester had most of theirs, I think another night we could have had a draw or even nicked it. Creativity if a worry, but then over recent game we've had players missing. Ings scores goals from half chances and outside the box, Vestergaard threatens from set pieces, Redmond/Djenepo provide some creativity, and Walcott has been better in the wide areas rather up front. Even Romeu has played a few balls in behind this year, so the injuries are going to take their toll. Also got to remember we are still a work in progress, we are only a year basically since being dead cert relegation fodder, the deadwood is still causing problems, there is no other investment, covid obviously happened etc. Someone like Leicester have been developing their squad and performing for longer, they probably have most of their key positions with very good players, and yet we matched them without about 5 first teamers, shows how far we have come. We lost to a good team, narrowly and played well despite lots of players out can't complain about that. If we get players back I still think we can finish pretty high this season and then hopefully progress from there with a few more key additions to give the squad some more quality and options. Also should not I think our April and May is full of 'easier' on paper games so hopefully we can have a strong end to the season, we might be a bit more up and down over the next month with some tougher games and the injuries.

Our current striker beyond Ings and Adams are a 32 year old who is rapidly diminishing and has never been much of a goalscorer at his peak, a 31 year old loan, who whilst is doing well for us has never been a regular goalscorer, and an unproven 20 year old who needs game time and another 21 year old who's had a few sub appearances. Considering Adams and Ings have been injured this year, we really need someone who can replace them so I think it's less worrying about Ings leaving and more about having a viable option up front if either of the first choice two are injured. I mean you never know, if we keep our form up we could be in the Europa league next year (especially as with City and Spurs in the league cup final that place will likely go to 7th OR is the Europa league 2 going to be a thing?) so squad depth could be more important next year. Looking for another striker is shrewd just incase Ings doesn't sign, but we need more alternatives anyway even if he stays.

Is there like a page reloading button? or something similar, on most browsers that turns to a cross to stop the loading of the screen, not sure what it would be on a phone.

Favourite underdo status is probably us or Leeds. Nice to read all the youtube comments about us from other fans saying we are underrated etc. etc. Also have to say Burnley often get praised for not having loads of foreign players, but a good proportion of our first team - Ings, Adams, Redmond, Armstrong, JWP, KWP, Bertrand and McCarthy are British. Hard for any neutral to criticise us at the moment, we play decent football that is often easy on the eye, work very well as a team, don't have any big ego players, don't splash the cash or have a sugar daddy, have plenty of British players, try to use our academy players etc.

And Man Utd have spent hundreds and hundreds of millions and have the highest wage budget in the league and are only really challenging because everyone is as inconsistent as them (and they still got knocked out of the champs league and will likely fall away in the league) so yes just splashing the cash is no guarantee. Though it also has be stated that coming straight into the league from another country and performing in your first season, especially with a curtailed pre-season doesn't happen that often with most foreign signings. Chelsea signed some good young players who will i think likely provide good value for money and improve their team. Investment would be good, but it has to be used wisely. It would just be nice for us to say go out and spend £40 million like say Leicester did on Tielemans if we really wanted to because we were very sure such a player would improve our team, rather than always be in the £15 - 20 million, gamble section of the store. Just kind of think it would be nice to have a little more just in case we find like the next Haaland or Mane or something in Europe but have already spent our 2 x £15 million allotted signings for the year.

Maybe Schalke are being set up as our European feeder team to park U18 youngsters because of Brexit 😄 (seriously though we probably do need one of those). But really a loan to worse performing team in Europe doesn't sound a good move to help him progress, he needs game time but not in a free falling mess of a club, and there is no way they have the cash to sign him.

Or you can pause the loading of the page just before the subscription banner comes up. 😄

All those are primarily associated with another club so don't really count. No one looks at Shearer and goes 'oh that ex-Southampton' player do they, he's a Newcastle legend who won the league with Blackburn. Same for the rest pretty much played or managed us for a season at best in most cases and far more associated with other clubs. For a 'Saints' pundit I think we'd have to be their main played for club or club they had the most success with, in much the same way Carragher - Liverpool, Neville - Utd, Redknapp - Liverpool, Shearer - Newcastle, Richards - Man City, Evra - Man Utd, Owen - Liverpool, Keane - Man Utd etc. etc. Candidates for that, maybe Rickie Lambert, James Beattie (though he's trying to be a manager), For one to appear though they have to something above and beyond everything else because they won't have played for one of the big 6 and therefore they are not much use (though I always think match day coverage is best with one pundit for either team and a neutral, England games with pundits who aren't English are better IMO than 3 ex-England players over praising England). Most main TV pundits are ex Liverpool, Man Utd, occasionally Arsenal and occasionally Spurs players, and Sky have got Micah Richards in there because Man City have become big. Much like the Sky Sports banner on youtube has 6 players on it, because the other 14 clubs in the league are just there to make up the numbers and be talked about far less.