Petriix

It would maybe be genuinely ironic if a) we had actually wanted him and b) we were actually above them in the table. Otherwise it's not.

Should we run a croudfunder to raise the money to drop him for the rest of the season?

I'll reserve judgement until we're 10 games in to our Championship campaign next season. On the whole we can objectively say that the club has gone backwards since the end of last season, but it's difficult to pin that all (if any) on the manager. I've struggled to warm to Smith at all - for many of the reasons outlined in the OP. I was a massive fan of Farke and his philosophy. I'm struggling to even see a clear plan under Smith. Overall I'm baffled as to why we abandoned our system from last season, I'm (somewhat irrationally) angry that we keep playing Gilmour as I feel like his arrival was the catalyst for our regression. I can't stand watching Hanley and Gibson lumping the ball forwards aimlessly. I just don't recognise the team anymore.

Farke's Championship champions were already over achieving: a well oiled machine, greater than the sum of its parts, four years in the making, where everyone understood their role and how it fitted into the overall team. Slicing a £60m hole in that and attempting to patch it up with unknowns was always going to be difficult. Slamming a diminutive number 8 shaped spanner in the works was the biggest mistake of them all. Then we've got the inexplicable decline of Cantwell... Let's be honest. The squad is weaker now than at any point in the last three seasons. The summer recruitment was abject, and the failure to even attempt to fix it in January was a sad capitulation, like yesterday's game.

Didn't he get booked when the ball (eventually) went out of play?

This is clutching at straws. Gibson gave away two penalties. We had two marginal calls waved away. Nothing would've changed the outcome. This was at home against the worst (form) team in the league. It's nothing but our own fault.

FML. Is Rupp injured?

Gilmour is again showing how utterly bad he is. He brings absolutely nothing to the team. Totally amateur.

Let's be honest, he's really not got the footballing brain for professional football. How many times can someone get caught offside while in acres of space? He's got so much pace that he can afford to start 5 yards further back yet he keeps doing the same thing and going too early. It's just brainless. You could forgive the odd offside if he had some redeeming features but he's so lacking in end product that it's really only his pace that he's got going for him. It's really indicative of our poor recruitment that he is seen as the better option than Tzolis. Someone of Placheta's limited ability shouldn't be anywhere near a Premier League squad.

I've written at length about it before. I'm convinced that trying to accommodate him in the team and essentially building a new formation around him was the catalyst for our awful start to the season and, ultimately, Farke's departure. There are of course counter arguments to this which we've been through ad infinitum but I stand by my (unprovable) claim. I wish we'd never signed him.

I'm probably the only one but I'd rather lose playing good football than win playing hoofball. However, it's not exactly a polar opposite: what makes 'good football' good is that it leads to exciting, attacking play with chances and goals. I still maintain that Farke's downfall was predicated by his loss of faith in his own style, and a failed attempt at pragmatism. He should have been more stubborn and stuck to the winning system which won two Championship titles. I doubt it would have led to fewer than 5 points. I'm struggling to warm to Smith and his philosophy. He lacks the class that Farke had. There just isn't much to get excited about on the pitch. Obviously I'll give him a chance in the Championship, but it's hard to imagine it coming close to what we saw with farkeball.

If we actually had a credible chance of league survival then I'd be all for playing the reserves in the cup. But, given we're certainly going down, a decent cup run is the only thing we have left. Sad really.

Let's face it, we had a massive midfield clear-out in the summer: (obviously Buendia and Skipp) Tettey, Vrancic, Stiepermann, followed by Martin and Hernandez then Cantwell out on loan. We've got Normann and Gilmour to go back at the end of the season. Without Rupp, who do we actually have? In the central area it's only McLean, PLM and Sorensen. As far as I'm concerned, we need to be investing heavily in that area of the pitch with a big signing, but I can't see how we could possibly let any of the others go. Likewise, with the attacking midfield, Rashica, Sargent, Placheta, Dowell and Tzolis is simply not enough. Maybe if any of the loanees come back then we could assemble a second tier team, but otherwise we need to invest there as well. A couple of decent signings and we could have a top quality Championship squad (say a Buendia and a Skipp).

Our midfield 3 were really good... until they weren't. Most of their work was (unsurprisingly) off the ball but they looked to pick up passes in tight areas and move it on quickly. Obviously possession was lost a number of times, but we also had a continuing threat on the break. The real work was in the disciplined positioning and tracking of the Liverpool players outside our box, which they all did with (mostly) great success for the first 60 minutes. Unfortunately, as the second half wore on, Normann looked exhausted, Gilmour started getting drawn out of position and McLean had a number of headless chicken moments where he vacated the space outside our box chasing the ball and left a huge gap for Liverpool to exploit, which they did.

While this is all true, it doesn't make it any less stupid. VAR *should* be giving correct decisions on situations like this. While you wouldn't really want play being brought back for trivial things, in this situation the ball was out of play and waiting for VAR to restart. In such instances, it's really simple to change from a throw in to a freekick.

What an odd post. I don't think there's an easier run-in for another team. They're playing all the teams below them. Sure, there's four tough games in there, but the rest are winnable.

Your argument is completely illogical. No one got 29 points last season. If one of the teams who finished higher had only got 29 points then that *might* have been enough but that is dependent on the team in 18th not benefitting from any of the additional points that team dropped. However, if one of the bottom 3 had achieved 29 points, that wouldn't have been enough. For them to have survived they would have required enough points to pass Burnley, so maybe as high as 40 points unless Burnley dropped more in that hypothetical scenario. Or are you imaging a 21st team slotting in between 17th and 18th? That makes no sense at all. All we can say with certainty is that Burnley survived with 39 points as the lowest points total of all the teams who avoided relegation. It therefore took a minimum of 39 points to survive. Every else is a hypothetical thought exercise which is dependent on reality being different.

Often in life the simple answer or the more widely held belief holds less truth than the more complex and nuanced point of view. Clearly some of us think about things in a little more depth than others. Talking about the points required for survival is purely hypothetical. If either you're imagining a 21st team figuring in the league (but somehow not dropping a single point to any of the bottom 3) or you're talking things from the point of view of one of the teams which did survive, then you're satisfied that exceeding 18th place is sufficient. But, if you're imagining one of the actual bottom 3 surviving then exceeding 17th place becomes necessary. It's ludicrous to argue about which one might be relevant in the current (or indeed any) season because it's talking about something that didn't happen vs something that did. If we do go down then it's all about how far short of 17th place we finished, and if we survive it's how far above 18th place we were. If you're getting into the realms of alternate realities then you also have to consider that the team in 17th place might have had fewer points in the end if they were passed by 18th place, and it's even more ludicrous to start arguing about how many points would have been required in that case. Then you have to consider, in the hypothetical scenario where e.g. Burnley finished on 29 points, how many of those dropped points might have been picked up by the team in 18th place and would that have raised the bar any higher? Regardless of whether or not you hold on to the belief that 29 points was enough for survival last season (it was if you did survive, wasn't if you didn't, and might/might not have been if reality was different), it almost certainly won't be enough for *us* to survive this season. Even if the bottom three all take the minimum possible points to the end of the season, for one of them to survive would require (in the alternate reality) enough points to pass 17th place. And I don't doubt that the people trying to simplify the discussion will collectively shrug at this post and maybe even try to tell me that I don't get it. All I'm saying is that there's a bit more depth to the though exercise. But none of it can alter reality.

Sadly I don't think that we will get to 34 points, nor do I think that 34 points will be enough to survive. The bottom 3 might well all have less than 34 points, but it's the side in 17th place that we need to overtake.

I'll hold fire on the optimism for now (it's the hope that kills you) but there are some green shoots of a team emerging from the rabble that we were putting on the pitch in the first half of the season. Rashica is starting to look like a player who might be effective in the Championship, although the lack of end product (so far at least) is concerning. We'll need a decent summer transfer window to patch up the holes in the squad and it will be crucial to see who we move on.

Our central midfield was weirdly better against Man City than against Palace. Kenny's passing was a bit better while PLM had a worse game. Gilmour moved the ball well mostly, until he gave it away for their third goal. The off the ball work was generally disciplined although Gilmour still has a tendency to get too tight in the opposition half and end up out of position. Our defensive issues were almost all down their left/our right with Aarons and Sargent failing (unsurprisingly) to cope with Sterling. You could probably fault the midfield for failing to track the runs into the box or the centre backs for not dealing with the balls across, but they were up against some world class movement. We were good in the first 20 minutes. Ok in the first half and fell apart in the second. The second goal killed the game and our damage limitation was not successful.

While I agree that a high pass completion rate is not necessarily indicative of a good performance, a low percentage is almost always a sign of bad game. For a central midfielder to only complete 15 successful passes while giving the ball away 12 times is in the realms of 'shockingly bad' and there's no plausible way of dressing that up to look better. Kenny wasn't exactly a top class Championship player. He was a real liability at times. He clearly does a job, but we really needed to upgrade that area in the summer. His continued incumbency shows the depth of our recruitment problems. You can argue that it's more symptomatic of our current (pragmatic) style. But I'm extremely disappointed to see us gifting possession away so lightly and frequently. It's hard on the eye and painful to watch in contrast to the scintillating play we have seen in recent years. I am confident that, if we had a bit more quality in central midfield, we would find it far easier to build attacks and get on the front foot. It's hard not to lay the blame at the feet of the players currently in those positions.

Who even drives via the A17? It's M6, A14, A11.

Let's be clear: McLean did a good job of covering Gallagher when we didn't have the ball. That's one part of his role. He had 38 touches of the ball, attempted 27 passes and gave the ball away 12 times. Just 55% pass accuracy. Those are damning statistics for a central midfielder. In contrast PLM achieved 77% accuracy from 31 passes, losing possession 7 times. That's not great, but nowhere near as bad as McLean. I know our standards are low, but describing McLean as "having a good game" is pretty generous.

It's a bit of a sad state of affairs when we're feeling relieved to come away with a point from a home game against a lower mid-table team. When you look at the stats it shines a light on just how ineffective we were. Those with thoughts of survival need to consider just where the required points are supposed to come from. We're running out of 'winnable' games. Last night was firmly in that category. The sad thing is that we never looked like threatening their goal after the 20th minute. Fair enough while we were winning, but there has to be some attacking intent after the equaliser. With every third pass resulting in a loss of possession, it's not hard to see what's wrong. Aimlessly lumping the ball forward is painful to watch.