It's Character Forming

It's true about the first Farke season. Second time, there was a level of indignation among some journalists that we were not able to do better having gone down and straight back up, and to a degree I can understand it although it was also partly from ignorance about the squad changes. From our perspective there's the whole "sold our best player thing" (although people are happy to also give Webber a hard time about not selling Cantwell when he could have commanded a much higher transfer fee, so there's a lot of hindsight involved with the criticisms). But IMO the big failing was that Webber spent a lot of that money on wingers which was always a strange piece of thinking. Having lost your two key players (Buendia and Skipp) was one thing, but you then need to spend the money on players who could at least potentially replace their contribution, and there's no way I can see that the signings Webber made could ever have done that. So I'm firmly of the view that sacking Farke was a response to failings largely by Webber. And the decision to replace him with Dean Smith was a disastrous and panicked move, because DS was a totally different type of coach from Farke which therefore destroyed the system Farke had built up, and the fact that DS was not available when Farke was sacked shows it was a panic move.

With Luton it just irritates me a bit that they have this media love-in for them, which we never had the season when we were comfortably mid table in the Prem under Lambert. Luton have made a great signing in Barkley, but that sort of signing looks great when it works out, not so good if it doesn't (cough Gilmour).

I'd like to remind everyone that Man Utd also have a 7-0 away defeat on their recent Prem CV.

LOL you just made those numbers up, didn't you ?!

Yep I think the lino has looked at the defenders near Barnes and he looks marginally nearer the goal than them, but even that is marginal, & as people has said he’s actually behind the ball. Shame for him as he clearly wants to get some goals for us.

Well worth a watch

Great report on a great performance

Fantastic result and performance- it’s incredibly tight but the opening is there for us .

It would be madness if the club was not exploring options and Wagner must know that his future depends on how well the rest of the season goes, any football manager knows they have zero job security with a handful of exceptions. Going for someone at this level is a gamble, it's what we did with Farke and it took some time but it worked pretty well, but there's no guarantee. Also our financial position if we don't go up will be very similar to the Farke season when we had to sell Maddison to generate the funds for a very careful squad rebuild.

I've googled this (which I thought was appropriate) and I still have absolutely no idea what you mean.

Just sore you didn't think of it...😀

Yes folks, ICF is going to Wembley On 7th July To see AC/DC. But hopefully will be going there earlier as well to see City win again ! [Sorry couldn't resist guys].

I can't help wondering if the OP is influenced by Ip**** being rubbish when they've been in the playoffs in the past e.g. losing in the semis to the biggest team in East Anglia ? Just a thought.

I probably sound like a broken record, but at the start of the transfer window, I'd have said "success" means getting in a CDM and strengthening up front. We'll have to see whether Knapper agrees on the need for a CDM in the next window, as January is never a good time to buy, and whether we've ended up stronger up front, only time will tell.

I agree 100%, VAR is good for some aspects but it's the offside when they're looking at players elbows etc that makes it a nonsense. A middle ground between a yellow and a red would be great, far better to have a player removed for a period rather than have them gone for the whole game which always radically changes the entire match. Then keep the red for genuinely bad challenges or handball on the line etc.

I wish him well and I hope it will overcome his confidence issues. it says something about the standard though, if he’s walked in to a starting role.

There's an amusing book called Pies and Prejudice on this topic, mainly poking fun at southern ignorance about the north, eg apparently Des Lynam one time said on live TV "and here's the update from the local derby between Chester and Chesterfield...". Also, the BBC has a North of England correspondent, but not one for the South - that would be redundant as most of their journalists are in reality South of England correspondents. Apparently the NE (Newcastle etc) regard themselves as the "True North" and regard Sheffield as "down south" which makes the author say, can you seriously suggest Sheffield is not "Northern". Frankly to me, from the South, Sheffield is the perfect example of a Northern City. Also I read a while back in the Economist that the whole "North/South" divide is widespread e.g. in Spain, Italy and Belgium, "northeners" look down on "southerners" as lazy etc etc with the same sort of stereotypes going back and forth despite the paradox that the north of Italy is obviously south of the whole of Belgium.

I'm with you there 😀

Interesting, am I right to read it as just 3 aerials won for Max, which is the fundamental weakness he has and there's no getting away from it. We used to see teams targeting him in the air in the Champs and I'd expect that sort of weakness is going to be exploited in the Prem even more. It's a shame because otherwise IMO he's a really talented player. If he was average height for a fullback, he'd probably be playing for one of the big teams.

Don’t joke ! Mind you, Watford would do it !

Gonna be a few absentees here this evening 😂

Yess ! Hold on Preston!

COYY !

It was a bit annoying and I agree it reduced the atmosphere, but we did pretty well IMO, the home fans were quiet for surprisingly large chunks of the match and we made a decent amount of noise I thought. I noticed a couple behind me conspicuously not celebrating our equaliser, and I almost felt sorry for them, they looked so sheepish surrounded by people leaping around, but hopefully it'll discourage them from doing it again. The annoying thing is it's easy to cut out 99% of the people who do this by making it a requirement that you've bought at least a handful of tickets over the last couple of seasons. It's not rocket science. I remember one year when I missed the boat on a City ticket for the game at Forest as I just forgot about getting one until it was too late, so I checked about home tickets and Forest had that sort of requirement which ruled me out obv.

Oh fair enough, careful wording by the twitter guy then as this has clearly been his breakthrough season, but there you go.