Jump to content

BigFish

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content Count

    6,835

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    5

Posts posted by BigFish

  1. Posted

    41 minutes ago, wr4sb said:

    "The FA Cup final has also been moved to the penultimate weekend of the Premier League season.

    It will be played on a Saturday, and will also be independent of any Premier League matches, as will the Friday before the final "to allow focus on the build-up to the showpiece event".

    "The FA Cup is our biggest asset," said FA chief executive Mark Bullingham."

    So the FA Cup is the biggest asset and a showpiece event but will be played BEFORE the last Premier League fixtures... Hmmmm... Call me old fashioned but if it's THAT important you have it the week AFTER the last Premier League fixtures.

    I noticed that as well. It looks like the FA have swapped this in return for having EPL free weekends for the Cup.

    The truth is the FA Cup has been a second order competition for some time and it only going one way.

  2. Posted

    17 hours ago, Midlands Yellow said:

    I thought they might squeeze top 6 but started slow again after bedding in new players. Have definitely ran out of steam at the business end but have a plan to get where they want. My tip for autos next season. 

    Possibly, looking at the relegation fodder in the EPL this year, next years Champs could well be much weaker than this year. Although if the binners do go up it would leave a couple of strong sides behind, finances permitting.

  4. Posted

    20 hours ago, Grumpy said:

    Off the top of my head apart from Murphy,Maddison and Buendia I cant think of anyone we have sold recently who has enhanced their reputation.Their bank balance maybe
    Even Skipp is struggling to make the team (I know we didnt sell him but he illustrates my point).

    I doubt the average neutral even remembers who Buendia is

    • Confused 1

  5. Posted

    4 minutes ago, king canary said:

    It isn't that he isn't good, more that he's unlikely to attract the kind of bids we'd consider. 

    That is the key to this debate, less about how good the players are are and more about whether they are starters in the EPL and therefore worth top dollar. I suspect on that metric only Sara and Sargeant meat the criteria, with Rowe perhaps needing more games.

  8. Posted

    5 hours ago, Robert N. LiM said:

    The Championship is just a tough league. Especially at the end of a long season, and with mid-week, and Easter, games to add in to that. It's really hard to just keep winning.

    There is currently no team in the league that has won more than three of its last five games. And no one has more points from their last five games than NCFC.

    I think 75 will be enough, so win the home games and get a point away.

  11. Posted

    On 02/04/2024 at 20:39, Christoph Stiepermann said:

    Unrealistic model to follow. Their owner is a fan who also has access to hundreds of millions that he can blow on his favorite team. Tony Bloom is like the equivalent of Delia and Michael if they were both billionaires and unfortunately that is a very rare occurrence and as far as I'm aware there isn't a Norwich fan out there who has that type of money to spend.

    Yes Brighton made a large profit this year but it was after years of losses and if Bloom got a couple of head coach appointments wrong he could very easily still be owning a Championship club with huge debt being penalized by FFP rules and no way to bail them out of it. Plus they got promoted and survived for a couple of years under Hughton playing a style of football that has worked for a few other clubs that a lot of fans look at enviously but one that they would never accept at our club. 

    Brighton might now be the model club to follow but to get where they are they had to rely on massive investment from their owner and their fans accepted pragmatic football for a while until they were in a position to change it. We won't ever be able to spend hundreds of millions to get there and a large proportion of our fans will never accept anything other than attacking football so it's a pointless comparison. 

     

    Thing about model clubs is they can always tell you something. In this case TB has sunk hundreds of millions of pounds that he is unlikely ever to see again. What has that go him? Not the mythical "established EPL club", but a selling club that currently sits 9th. Rumour is there is unrest in the ranks and the coach is likely to move on at the end of the season. So they will then have to go again, and again, and again. This may well work, but Leicester is a recent example of a club running out of road when trying to be competitive at the elite level season after season,

    • Like 2

  12. Posted

    6 minutes ago, sgncfc said:

    Pushed our midfield and back four 10-15 yards upfield before their "set". Brought on Gibbs for Duffy, put Maclean at CB and told Sainz to cover his winger and give MacCallum more support. Push Sara up and brought on Fassnacht for Barnes.

    Einstein strikes again, if only our coaching team had thought to tell Sainz to cover his man, why didn't they?

  13. Posted

    15 minutes ago, S_81 said:

    He sat us far deeper. And changed nothing until we were behind. And that was coming, clearly coming. 
     

    Now, as I’ve said in this thread, Leicester certainly have more strength in depth and may always beat us regardless, especially away from home, even going toe to toe. But I’d have rather seen us try and take the game to them more. We didn’t. And from what I just watched I’d say that’s because we deployed a tactic of sitting deep and trying to counter. It didn’t work. And he didn’t have a plan B for it. 
     

    The manager has underperformed today. Far less so than the upturn in results, which I give him credit for. He’s got us into the territory we should be. But I still have huge questions about whether he could see this team through the play offs, if he even gets us there. 
     

    First thing’s first - a must win against the scum. 

    Fair comment 🙂 

    • Like 1

  15. Posted

    Just now, S_81 said:

    I don’t love when we lose. That’s why I make noise about it. And I don’t make critical noise when we’ve won - as I’m happy we’ve won. It’s not rocket science. 
    And the reason I’m making noise today is he’s changed the winning tactical approach. And that’s cost us. Today. 

    You can see why that is what it looks like. Very quiet when we win, all over it when we lose. And anyway we played and unchanges team so implying we had changed the tactical approach is complete bobbins.

  16. Posted

    1 minute ago, S_81 said:

    That’s your weird interpretation. The rest of us are questioning why he’s not actually had a go at trying to win the game. That’s it.  

    No, thats not it. It is just posters like you loving when we lose. We go on a run and you lot shut up, waiting, hoping for when we lose so you reinterred your negative opinions and sya you were right all along.

    • Like 3

  17. Posted

    3 hours ago, BroadstairsR said:

    There's got to be a catch somewhere with all these individuals and complicated organisations  prepared to throw millions away like confetti on English football clubs which are essentially businesses doomed to lose money.

    There seems to be a never-ending queue of them lined up ready to pour their money down the drains of places like Ipswich and West Brom, that they had probably never heard of a year before.

    I'm lost. 

    South Sea Bubble? More like North Sea Bubble to me. When will it burst?

    A lot of people make a lot of money from football:players, coaches, agents, TV, executives, merchandisers, hangers on, occasional speculators etc taking out a lot more than the fans put in. That shortfall is filled by "investors".

  19. Posted

    1 hour ago, Fen Canary said:

    If you buy nobody and suffer another meek relegation there’s no guarantee that you come back up the following season though. Even if we had Buendia for one more Prem season he would have likely been off if we’d been relegated again, a player of that calibre isn’t going to be happy yo-yoing for eternity and then we’d be back to where we are now anyway having to alter the style of play because it simply didn’t work without him.

    I don’t blame the club for rolling the dice. In hindsight Smith was a poor choice but I can understand the thinking of trying to switch to a more pragmatic style, it’s just that it’s taken a few transfer windows to alter the personnel on the pitch to play that way 

    This is a valid point, and runs counter to what seems general opinion. Not that makes it wrong, back to the issue of counter factuals.

  20. Posted

    1 hour ago, Monty13 said:

    I’m not sure. I agree it would have been met with much nashing of teeth on here but I doubt the psychological damage would have been so pronounced. It’s clear we bought Tzolis and Sargent with an eye in future value, a few older heads and freebies would have been far cheaper. Let’s not pretend there was no money to spend, we brought in more than Rashica, Sargent and Tzolis.

    Of course nothing is certain, I would just argue the effect of losing Buendia was highly probable to be highly destructive and played out as expected IMO. Yes keeping him was also massively uncertain, I would simply argue it was less so.

    Arguably this is true, but not the whole story. Sacking Farke which many fans, even maybe a majority, called for and appointing Smith, who nobody really called for, had a greater long term impact. That is not what the SD model is for. And as it happens the transfer business that Summer doesn't look so bad in hindsight. Sargeant is talismanic for our season this year. Tzolis is ripping up Bundeslegia II, PLM is knocking on the door of the French national team, Gilmour is a top end EPL player, Rashica won the League in Turkey. Who knows, we might even break even.

    Webber was trapped by the idea another relegation was unacceptable. If we had accepted it was likely and planned ahead last season wouldn't have seen such a decline. He rolled the dice and failed, but it is understandable failure. The price we paid was that precious momentum. So yes keep Buendia, keep Farke, get relegated, bounce back better. Ultimately there isn't the patience in the club, or football for this.

  21. Posted · Edited by BigFish

    4 hours ago, king canary said:

    Yes, I wonder if those who argued the opposite will hold their hands up. Feels unlikely.

    I don't mind admitting that I thought at the time it was likely that Buendia wanted to double his wages and avoid another likely unsuccessful releagation fight. As such it was logical to think the club had no choice. Events and @Parma Ham's gone mouldy have persuaded me otherwise. But the problem with alternate histories is they compare the subjective with the known outcome. Should we have kept Buendia our transfer budget would have probably amounted to 1 x EPL player (a CB or Skipp replacement) and 2 x loans. The likely outcome is another unsuccessful fight against relegation. In this situation the self same posters who rake up Buendiagate would have equal and opposite critiques. The fact I was wrong in my opinion doesn't necessarily mean I think they were right.

    That said I take Parm's point on sporting momentum to heart. I see that, and now agree. This is a post about opinions, not of opinions.

    • Like 1

  23. Posted

    1 hour ago, cambridgeshire canary said:

    I mean I think Fisher will be better in the future but why we thought someone who's only played in non leuage would improve our defence I don't know

    Simply put, we didn't. The view was that neither were good enough for our first choice starting 11 but could be useful in case of injuries, tiredness etc. The economics made Fisher so much cheaper for the 245 minutes of League action required.

    The simple question is do you want a big squad of average players or a squad of a few above average players and a larger number of below average players making up the numbers.

  24. Posted · Edited by BigFish

    2 hours ago, Robert N. LiM said:

    People more adept with numbers than me can confirm or deny, but isn't the question of 'how many points to beat seventh'? the wrong question? Don't we have to ask "How many points to finish sixth?"

    I know it seems like the same thing, but I'm not sure it is. There are only a finite number of points available in a Championship season, so in a season where the seventh-placed team have done poorly (in historical terms), that might just mean that the teams above them have done unusually well, and there might be a gap between sixth and seventh.

    It's basically the same debate that we had about the number of points needed to stay up in the PL, and whether you were looking at the average score of the 18th-placed team or the 17th placed team.

    If anyone can clarify this in terms I can understand the nerd in me would be very grateful.

    Effectively it is the same question, although people like the former because it shaves a couple of points off the target. But there is 11 point range between the highest and lowest points achieved for 7th place which just goes to show the variability between seasons. So the actual question is how many points to achieve 6th THIS season. It is just a calculation from now until the end of the season, not a statistical average season from August.

    We just need to match the performance of, say, the best of the three teams below. I suspect the worst case scenario is one of them picks up 6 wins (or 2 ppm) so 75/76 is enough. Though if one of them wins the lot we would just have to take our hats off to them & it would be a record (unless we could catch WBA).

    • Like 1

  25. Posted

    15 hours ago, Icecream Snow said:

    It's tight at the top. I think the highest 3rd place historically is 89 points, so it'll be interesting to see if records are broken.

    image.thumb.png.6e96ea4af3585a9951173ff2d170efca.png

     

    15 hours ago, Well b back said:

    I suspect all 4 will crack the 89 points. As it stands, I think ( dependant on Leicester ) one club could miss out with as many as 95, which shows how important wins are instead of draws as the binners have only beaten one top six team.

    Sunderland got 90 in '98, finished 3rd and didn't go up.

×
×
  • Create New...