mrfahaji

Commentator just said "for all their possession, Fraser Forster hasn't had a save to make". That's lucky!

Tadic got some criticism the other week for missing chances, some of it fair, some a little harsh. That though, had to at least be on target. Awful miss.

Depressing set of results today. Let's hope we can win so I can not care (as much) about the other games!

All I know is whenever I've been in a position to go and eagerly looked for when the Chelsea game was, it was either when I was out of town (e.g. Boxing Day), or we took a small allocation. Perhaps being midweek and maybe on Sky (?), the club thought it wouldn't sell the bigger allocation. They had the same reasoning last season when we played on Sunday on Sky. What a game/evening that was btw.

Lol, that last detail is brilliant.

Tell me about it, I've lived a 10 minute walk from Stamford Bridge for a few years now and have yet to get a ticket to see us there!

The only thing the table shows is how regularly teams perform better or worse than he thinks in a given week. This season, when he has looked at the week's fixtures, he clearly hasn't fancied us, and we've proved him wrong many times. I doubt he tipped us for relegation at the start of the season though. Your graph is good for showing the teams he over/under rates on a weekly basis, and maybe that is reflective of how he perceives them in general, but I think that's as far as it goes; you can't use the points from his table to assume he thinks 30pts is enough to avoid relegation...! If Lawrenson's main objective was to get an accurate league table, all he'd have to do is predict based on what's needed to get closer to the actual. For example, "Spurs have won 14 games so far, I've only predicted them to win 11 so far, so I'll predict them to win this week." After a week or two this wouldn't give a perfect league table but after a while you'd start getting pretty close. So to somehow think that the league tables above are reflective of his "season" predictions completely misses the point, and is a perfect example of how statistics can be misused and misinterpreted. And that is coming from someone who bl00dy loves data and statsistics!

Oh FFS, this isn't a representation of how he thinks the table will/should end up! How difficult a concept is it to grasp?!

Me too, there's no way Everton will be signing him, they've already lined up Sergio Ramos and Thiago Silva. Jerome Boateng is also desperate to join them and will be their back up option.

I was at that game, fantastic day. Funnily enough the game that really stands out for me under Pochettino was Fulham at home, I think we won 2-0. I was laughing at how good we were, particularly at getting the ball back. Every time Fulham got possession I knew we'd have it back within about 5-10 seconds. The downside with Pochettino's era is that while we hardly ever had a game where we were outplayed, we also lacked a cutting edge in the final third, similar to our situation this year. We rarely got in behind teams because our passing football often went from side to side. Just writing that I'm feeling like I could be reviewing this season - the difference under Pochettino was how assertive our defending was, whereas now we sit deeper. Could be equally as effective, but not as enjoyable to watch. That's why I think the early days of Koeman were possibly our best. We had the foundations of fitness and pressing from Pochettino's time, yet our attack was more unpredictable as we could go direct as well as pass it around nicely. Defensively we were amazing (just check out Pass the Dutchie's 'goals conceded' chart!) and even though we didn't score loads, you felt as though we could score at any moment, whereas under Pochettino it had reached the stage of "I know we'll play well, but will we have any shots?" Having said that, although our final standing improved each year with Koeman, I don't think our style of football did. I'm not convinced he's that good a manager, but somehow finds a way to eek out results. Maybe I'm finding excuses and being unfair on reserving credit, but I'd rather have Pochettino in charge.

Not sure you can have a good thing compounded by a bad thing... Is Gabbiadini a sicknote? Perhaps you have knowledge of his injury history at Napoli and before in which case fair enough, but not sure it's a fair assumption if solely based on his current injury! No reason we can't play good football with Austin, he's not a bad footballer and I've seen him hold the ball up and bring others into play well this season. Better than either Rodriguez or Long. Obviously he isn't as mobile so we'd have to adapt our play by playing through him and getting runners beyond him, rather than ending moves with through balls for him to chase. He's also more of a threat from crosses, and we do seem to like those. Champions League is optimistic, but if we kept our team together and added one or two players (CM & GK would be top of my list), I don't think it's as "cloud cuckoo land" as others make out. Unfortunately I can't see us keeping the team together... :-(

Not sure if this is a sarcastic post... Anyone could predict on a week by week basis and end up with an almost perfect league table at the end of the season. A more (albeit only slightly...) interesting stat would be a league table of how many scorelines per team he got right over the season. Would you give him credit if he predicted every win as a loss and vice versa, yet still ended up with the same points/position?

The caveat with these predictions is that they are done on a week by week basis. If I was predicting, say Liverpool to win against Burnley and they lost, I would probably predict them to bounce back and win the next one against Stoke. If they lost that one as well, I might think "I can't see them losing three on the bounce, so I'm going to predict they beat Everton." I've predicted them to win 3/3, whereas if you had asked me at the start of the three games how many they'd win, I might only say 1 or 2. It's why you get extremes at either end of the table - I doubt he'd have predicted Hull only to win 2 games all season, or Liverpool to go undefeated if you'd asked for his predicted table at the start of the campaign. Doesn't mean his predictions aren't silly though. I used to play a "predict Lawro's predictions" game with some colleagues, was much more fun, although also pretty easy...!

Managers often like to have "their man in the camp", so to speak. Martina may well be that for the Koemans. Paul Telfer for Strachan, Pied for Puel perhaps. Sure there are many examples through our history and around the league - Nolan for Allardyce probably the best of the bunch!

They certainly have a better first XI. There's an argument that the Manchester clubs have better squads, but only because they've spent so much money signing up shedloads of "fairly good" players.

I think his departure is more complicated than that. I'm not sure he left purely for money, but certainly don't think it was because of ambition either. Differing views from the board about the way forward for the club, and not wanting to sign a new contract surely came into play. It's hard for me to wish either Pochettino or Koeman well, but my main dislike of Everton has sprouted from the apparent delusion of those close to, or fans of the club, with an unhealthy dose of classlessness from some others when RK joined them. I find Spurs fans as a whole a pretty intolerable bunch, and the thought of Daniel Levy's smug face if they won the title is just unbearable, but they don't hold a candle to Everton fans in terms of misplaced high opinion of themselves.

Read that it was a foul on Herrera, can only imagine he threw himself to the ground, rolled around in 'agony', before remonstrating with the ref to get him sent off. He is such a little sh1t.

I'd prefer the London clubs to stay up purely on the basis that it's two away games that are much more feasible to get to. For the same reason I'm hoping Fulham get promoted!

Any chance we can stick to suggestions or rumours for transfers in rather than just discussing whether van Dijk will leave? Maybe we can even have hypothetical replacements for him if he were to leave, or ideal centre back partner if he doesn't?!

I think the opposite is true with Middlesbrough actually - I reckon they would have stayed up if they'd brought someone else (not Agnew) in earlier. Karanka did a good job for a while and may yet have a bright future but even in the Championship they were built to be solid defensively and get 1-0 wins. To start off with that seemed to be working for them in the Premier League too, but teams are going to score against you in the PL, and you need to be able to respond if that happens, but Karanka just couldn't shift his "don't get beaten" mentality, they'd been playing defensively for so long that they couldn't change things up when they needed to. I know it's easy to say about a team that's currently in the bottom three, but I worry a bit for Swansea now. Mainly because they seemed, around the time this thread was started, to have had a rebirth and were climbing up the table. But despite going through a purple patch, they're back in it and having to dig deep again.

We might be best to approach this game as we would a home game. If we take a cautious approach they will gradually wear us down and bully us with their physical play. We can't match them in that department, especially with Clasie instead of Romeu, so we should perhaps focus on targetting their weaknesses. They will find it tough dealing with the likes of Redmond and Long, so we should take the game to them a bit more and make them deal with our strengths rather than letting them dictate the match. Balls in behind and getting their big defenders turning may prove to be the key to a win.

Totally agree. Earlier in the season he was so frustrating because he'd get the ball, cut inside a bit, stop, look around, before eventually making a 5 yard pass. He never went to the byline. Now he has that duel threat, not only is he prepared to go on his left but he also seems to be making decisions quicker when he receives the ball.

He was managing Olympiakos though. Celtic haven't lost a game home or away in the league this season but I still don't want Brendan!

Good post S-Clarke, particularly agree about Redmond and Long - would rather see Long getting into the positions knowing that at some point he'll get one than seeing Rodriguez never quite fashioning a chance. At least Long gets you on the edge of your seat that something MIGHT happen! However, while I'm sure he will get one eventually, I'm not convinced the floodgates will open, he's always likely to waste chances. Gilt-edged chances btw

Fair enough, thanks for the summary. I think perhaps the period after they scored may be the period that stuck out for him and for posters on the match thread. You say "after we scored", but wasn't it HT after we scored? I watched the second half, agree we played pretty well (which my original post on the first page would show), relieved that we scored the goals our performance merited, was worried they weren't going to come.