It's Character Forming

Out of contract now apparently.

Personally I think Gunn (as of last season) is better than Ruddy at his best, Ruddy was never great against low shots to the corners and always had the occasional random howler in him.

The question for me is about the injury when he joined us, was it cleared by a medical then ? Was he any higher risk than a player with no injury history ? To a degree there's a gamble with any player they can be hit by an injury just after they arrive.

A genuine defensive midfielder, that was nice to have.

Funny that in some ways it feels longer ago than 8 years, there's been a lot happened ! One of the many ironies of football is that when you go up as champions it's often a bit of an anti-climax when you actually secure promotion because by then it's been effectively in the bag for practical purposes. But going up by winning the playoffs is incredible experience on the day. Having said that, if we compare the season when we were promoted under Farke and were crowned as champions despite losing to B'mouth after we had a player sent off early on, I'd re-live that season given the choice.

Thanks, some of these made me smile ! Where is Serie A screened nowadays BTW ? I used to watch it on Channel 4 back in the 90s and really enjoyed it then, I found it an interesting mix of skill/technique but very cynical defending !

Someone was saying recently they watch a lot of Serie A, was it on the Milan derby thread ? Tomori gets mentioned a lot and you'd feel if he's playing regularly in defence in Serie A he must be worth a look. I agree on Mings, needs to get his head together and he could be a top player. Thing about Maguire, you look back at the world cup finals and he was impressive for us in defence and also attacking at set pieces, I'd say he's hard to leave out of the squad.

who would people swap for Maguire, Phillips and Henderson in that squad ? How would we compare someone who's a squad player for Man City or Man Utd against someone who's a starter for Palace or Leicester or Soton etc? The reality in football is that you can lose your place as a starter to someone better and the top Prem clubs esp Man City can bring in players in any given position who are the very best in the world and can afford to have backups who are nearly as good, which may mean someone who's the best or one of the best English players in that position end up not starting for those clubs.

Disappointing that the Takeover Code doesn't legally rule out the scenario where a murderous foreign woman comes along and "offers considerably more", I'm surprised they've not thought about that one.

Mark Robins is in his second spell at Coventry. Just sayin... (again).

But hey, aside from that the OP was spot on !

I've mixed feelings, I'd like to see Everton have to mix it up down in the Champs and I quite like Leicester generally but it would be a bit irritating for Smith to make lots of mileage out of keeping them up, and you know he would.

I love to see a self-aware post. It’s a low bar…

It makes me smile when people are pointing to Newcastle as a model to follow. I think if you have owners with unbelievable amounts of money who get in a sensible manager and the club spends wisely to make shrewd signings from the top drawer then it’s pretty easy for the staff and supporters to be happy. It could easily go wrong if they decide to start getting in primadonnas like Neymar.

Sometimes I feel I’m on another planet. Yes it was a gamble due to his injury, if he’d recovered and played regularly he could have been the DM we’ve all been banging on about and we’d be in the playoffs now at least. I know it didn’t work out, but it’s over, we don’t have inflated wages like a millstone for years like we did with Naismith.

I hate the media fawning all over Newcastle

In the match briefing it quotes Smith that he wants them to be harder to beat. It’s a big call, whether courageous or foolish- time will tell.

For me, if I were in a high-profile job and it had gone badly, I'd probably deflect attention away and defend myself as best as I could. And that's just what Webber has done IMO. E.g. he opens by saying how disappointing the season was, but quickly says we only ended up 6 points off the playoffs and so winning the last couple of games could have put us right in it. Well, no, a couple of wins wouldn't have even got us into 7th place, it's simply wrong. And he says "don't judge us on the last 11 games", points out Coventry only had a few weeks in the top 6, we were there for 152 days or whatever. But that's really not helping, our aim was to be top 2 which I felt (and still feel) was realistic at the start of the season. If you're aiming for top 2 and get edged out at the end then that sort of excuse works, but not if you end up 13th with no realistic hope of the playoffs with a good 5 games to go, like we were. Also he talks about people thinking it's just like playing football manager and you can't have four top class centre halves at the club. This is deflection tactics, yes there are some of the fan base who are 21 and think it's like FM, but most City fans have been with the team much longer than Webber and are very well aware we have to be realistic about what we're able to afford in the squad (so your backup CBs are not going to be as good as your first choices) but we know you need a solid defensive midfielder who's not injured at the start of the season and you need to have a plan for when both your first choice CBs are injured/suspended which doesn't involve makeshift & inexperienced cover playing out of position. But we faced both problems last season and again this season, which is the most unforgivable thing for me.

I can't help feeling things have never been quite the same with Webber since he said he'd be leaving soon.

Seems very reasonable and sensible thing to say. If we look back at the defenders we've sold pretty soon after they broke into the first team, I'm thinking of Godfrey and Lewis, and those both look good business now.

Yes, the record for someone "in that position" would be Godfrey wouldn't it.

Yep that's much more plausible, and I think Omo will be a great CB in time, he's been badly exposed without a more experienced partner the last few games.

We got £35m for Buendia I thought so if we turned down more for Omo in Jan... that's simply unbelievable.

So it’s Robins second spell at Cov. Just saying.

“Never go back” 🤔