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Petriix

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Everything posted by Petriix

  1. That's pure fantasy. Firstly there is no evidence that anyone has shown any interest in buying the club. Secondly there's plenty of evidence (in the Championship and League One) that having billionaire owners doesn't automatically lead to success. Where we've failed is in player recruitment at this level. That suggests something is going wrong in the type of player we're trying to bring in. I suspect it's wages, but it's vastly complicated trying to get the balance right. Sheffield Utd got it seriously wrong and you can see the results.
  2. I'm struggling to imagine what you think Delia actually does. She's hardly the puppet master pulling all the strings behind the scenes. She's just a benevolent custodian of the club who doesn't have much choice other than to stick with the current funding model. I doubt very much that Delia actively wanted to sell Emi or sign this bunch of losers (literally). I don't think it's her choosing the tactics. I suspect that she just trusts Webber to get on with the job. So what's her actual crime? That she should be richer? Or do you believe she's holding back a stream of foreign billionaires who are itching to buy the club and invest £200m? Given our success relative to our means, all I'll say is be careful what you wish for!
  3. I don't know where you are getting your information from but it seems you're making wild assumptions about why Cantwell isn't getting into the team. As far as I'm concerned, his continuing absence is much more of an indictment of the mismanagement of the squad than any kind of reflection on the player himself. Cantwell could hardly do any worse than those keeping him out. It's baffling.
  4. Completely anonymous. Makes Kenny McLean look like an average Prem midfielder. The worst of our summer signings, which is really saying something. So slow it makes me pine for Alex Tettey to inject some pace into the midfield. Pierre Lees Melou, where are you... Pierre Lees Melou where are you?
  5. Because we brazenly cast half our team aside, signed a whole bunch of dross then completely abandoned the system we'd spent 4 years embedding at all levels throughout the club and instead built a new system around some inexperienced kid who turned out to have the positional awareness of an average school boy. Then, to compound things, we sacked our manager and brought in the most uninspiring head coach we've seen since Chris let's-hang-on-to-this-1-0-defeat Hughton. That's how.
  6. I think we should play 5-5-2. An extra body in defence and attack would really help. Then we might just nick a draw.
  7. I massively prefer two defensive midfielders. One of them can always drop between the centre backs if required. We typically get overrun in midfield so tightening up that area would be more prudent.
  8. Nah, it's left back... Left back at home while the actual professional footballers play the match.
  9. There's about as much chance of dropping a ball bearing out of a jumbo jet at 30,000ft and it landing on an egg sandwich.
  10. Pukki is our only genuine Premier League class player. It was pretty obvious to me that it was him that brought the slight edge of quality to the game on Sunday, I don't think Rashica did anything special other than being in the right place and (for once) actually hitting the target. It hasn't escaped me that he isn't getting any younger, but I am unsure whether we have another year option on his contract like we do with Cantwell.
  11. To be honest, Smith never had any credit with the fans in the first place. While Farke had two Championship titles and the club's record points haul in the bank, Smith has just one win, which we didn't really deserve. It's not a case of losing the fans, he first needs to win them. That is looking increasingly unlikely.
  12. I think it's a reasonable request that we show support during the game and vent frustration afterwards if necessary. Personally I'll find it easier now that Gilmour is out.
  13. It's hard to imagine us either scoring or keeping a clean sheet so something - nil to West Ham. Anyone's guess how many.
  14. I'd argue that it's slightly more ethical relying on a redistributed chunk of Premier League money than relying on the money pumped in by billionaire owners, gained invariably through exploitation and environmental destruction. As uncompetitive as it is, our business model is a beacon of light in comparison to the majority of other clubs.
  15. There's some real hyperbole on this thread. Charlton didn't 'dominate us' neither did Rashica turn the game. It was a fairly even encounter between two well matched sides where one moment (a simple long ball with Pukki's pace, a slightly awkward touch reminiscent of Stiepermann luring the keeper into no man's land and Rashica being in the right place to tap it in) proved pivotal. It's not that we were outclassed, or even particularly lucky to win. It's that we were playing a team who are mid-table in the 3rd tier that is of concern. One would hope that our players would be a class above all over the pitch. They weren't.
  16. We'll have to agree to disagree. He didn't tear a midtable League One defence apart so I think you're being a tad optimistic about the Championship. Feel free to resurrect this thread if he proves me wrong. Remember that he's basically a club record signing for our Premier League campaign. It's not about bashing the club - they won't be reading this. It's more about wallowing in the misery of the current situation so that, if the situation ever improves, I can properly enjoy it again. It's the rubbish times like this which make the good times actually feel good. Forgive me for being underwhelmed by scraping past lowly Charlton in unconvincing fashion.
  17. The midfield is obviously the issue, we have the same defence and attack as last season. But I think you're being generous with 'Championship level', and you're being generous to Rashica. I know he scored, but he really doesn't look look more than a middling Championship player to me. Sargent, PLM and Tzolis looked below par against League One opposition. Rashica looked average. That's our £30m+ of signings, 3 of the club's biggest ever fees paid. None of those would have been in our first team last season.
  18. A hard-fought 1-0 away win at a midtable side suggests we'd maybe be competitive towards the top of League One. Seems about right to me, especially if you compare our Premier League results to the plucky endeavours of some of the lower league clubs in the cup against similar opponents: Morecambe gave Spurs a good fight before ultimately succumbing to their quality, very similar to our recent encounter. Shrewsbury's 4-1 loss to Liverpool compares well to our two 3-0 defeats this season. Although at a slightly lower level, both Swindon and Chesterfield managed to score (while not quite conceding as many as us) in their heavy defeats to Man City and Chelsea (respectively) which is more than we can say. When you look at our 'progress' from last season, it's easy to see how we've gone from being a top Championship club to being closer to League One level. It doesn't bode well for our hopes in the Championship next year. It's pretty unfathomable how we managed to spend so much money on this squad.
  19. Exactly this. He did ok. Strange how people picked him out when PLM was so much worse and Kenny was his usual self.
  20. Some people have so little understanding of the tactical nuances of football it's laughable. Sorensen performed the role asked of him well today and had far better positional discipline than we usually see from Gilmour. He was frequently outnumbered in midfield because Kenny and PLM were all over the place. It was more of the same from this flawed 4-3-3 I've been complaining about all season. We need two, central CDMs but we only play with one and get overloaded. The wide midfielders don't support the fullbacks enough and the CMs get dragged wide leaving acres of space. Sorensen largely worked diligently off the ball and at least made an effort to cut off the passing angles. He may not have been great on the ball, but certainly no worse than our other midfielders. He's basically the opposite of Gilmour, in a good way.
  21. To be honest, I think I like our Championship teams and I don't like our Premier League teams. I detest the business of signing players for the top flight with the inflated fees, wages, egos etc. Every time we go up, we make a bunch of signings which always seem to backfire. I want to see us develop players in the Championship and retain them rather than selling them all and stop blowing stupid money on rubbish players. Looking back, we've signed so much dross. I loved it when we went up under Lambert and basically kept the same squad, same under Farke. I don't mind losing, as long as we haven't spent tens of millions on that bunch of losers. I feel no affinity with any of our recent signings and Dean Smith leaves me cold. I want Norwich to be the club who does things differently. Rather than aspiring to be Everton, I'd much rather keep yo-yoing but retain our identity. It's all a bit late now though, we've blown the money, lost the soul of the club and I fear we are at the start of a long decline.
  22. I believe he only started one of the 10 unbeaten games, otherwise played less than 10 minutes as a sub in a handful of the others. My spreadsheet only covered his first 12 months at the club, in which time we averaged 0.66 points per game he started. I guess we/he probably did better after January 2013 to finish 11th.
  23. I'm happy to forget that first half of the season, as long as we can also forget the awful summer transfer window, the total abandonment of our footballing philosophy and the way we've ripped the heart and soul out of the club in a failed attempt to adapt to the Premier League. Sadly we can't recall Emi, or buy that Skipp replacement, or indeed bring Farke back to orchestrate a similar brand of football to that which gave us our best ever season. So I'm unsure how this fresh start is supposed to go. If you're expecting this squad to miraculously play well enough to keep us up then I fear you're in for some serious disappointment. Maybe if we terminate Gilmour's loan and bring in a proper defensive midfielder then we might at least stop being hammered every week. Weirdly I don't see that happening either. The only positive I can find is that it's times like this which act as a counterpoint to the good times and make the relative success of the occasional Championship title all the more sweet.
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