Northern Canary

Its pretty clear that Lambert is an incredible motivator. I don''t think Morison is a particularly talented player but he was decent for us under Lambert. To be fair to Chris Hughton, the way things went after his arrival might just reflect Morison''s natural ability. Hughton is not a motivator like Lambert, so has rightly had to improve the quality of the squad. Hughton is less likely to polish turds, but has shown he has a good eye for a player with his signings of Redmond and Fer amongst others.

There are some areas of our play which frustrate me, but I do not know if they are down to the tactics, or whether it is something to do with the individual players, time taken to gel, motivation or coaching. Nevertheless, main frustration this season is how poor the passing has been and how every time the ball ricochets or gets deflected somewhere it always goes to an opposition player. We don''t seem to be winning many second balls for whatever reason and we don''t look too sharp. Tactically there are two areas that I don''t really understand. The first is how easily players manage to run through our midfield. Sometimes we get situations like Saturday, where players like Weimann manage to counter attack us in acres of space when we have so many people in midfield who tend to sit deep anyway. Other times we have two or three players in central positions but players seem to run through our core. The second is the use of wide players not playing on the side of their weaker foot. I can understand the occasional benefit of players being able to shoot from outside the box, but I think far more opportunities would be created by getting to the byline, and doing it quickly. Whenever we get to the byline, RvW always moved into space and there have been numerous occasions where a good cut back would create great opportunities which he would score from because his movement in the box is very good. The pace of our attacking play down the wing is hard to understand, because we tend to move up the pitch slowly, exchange between the fullback and winger until he sets off an inswinging cross as if from a set piece, which is easy for defenders to clear and much harder to RvW to convert compared to a ball that is whipped back into him from the byline. I am not critical of Hughton, and do think he is very experienced and tactically knows his stuff, but this is one thing I would be interested to hear him explain. I can see what system we are trying to play and I can see how it could work, but for whatever reason it doesn''t seem to click into place. My only real clear complaint is how defensively we set up away from home. We only won two away games last year, and both occasions we seemed to completely go for it and bully the other team, which is exactly how so many teams succeed against us.Given the talent in the Premiership, I believe that even if all you want is a point, you''re going to have to score at least one or two goals, because conceding is so likely in the Premiership. I understand the theory of setting up defensively, but we soak up so much pressure that a team can pin us in our own half and we have little chance to counter attack. In terms of improvement, I would like to see us get much better at counter attacking. If we insist on playing a tight system, then we need to be able to break or else we will be pinned down for the whole game, as we were against Spurs. I would like to see us give it a go away from home. A football pitch is essentially the same wherever we go so I don''t really understand why away games are considered so daunting. I would then like to see us attack at much greater pace with players on their stronger foot, getting to the line and cutting it back, which from what I can tell is very hard to defend against and much easier to score from.

[quote user="Louis Cyphre"]Ref89,Agreed passing isnt his strength. So I have two questions for you:1. Why does he persist and not do as you and I have suggested, lay it off to a passer? Is this because of poor coaching/man management or because the player repeatedly fails to take in the coaching/man management. It has to be one or the other.2. Can any modern team afford the luxury of having one player who wins the ball and tracks, but cant pass. This would place a hue amount of pressure on fer which opposition teams would quickly work out.Having a constructive debate about these issues is not picking a fault in every aspect of the team or club. I have been worried about this for some time and only want us to improve. The inverse to your logic is that we should preserve for perpetuity how we played last season. CH obviously doesnt share this view which is why he dismantled the squad.[/quote] Sometimes I think Johnson being left to play the ball could be down to the opposition rather than coaching instructions. If a team can identify one player as a weaker passer, they can afford him more space and focus on cutting off his options knowing he won''t be so likely to penetrate. I read that this is how Napoli beat Man City a couple of seasons ago; they identified Nigel de Jong as a poorer passer so allowed the play to go through him and marked the danger men. I don''t know whether this is the case but it would seem strange for the coaching team to encourage so much of the play to go through him, as it seemed to do away at Hull. I like Johnson a lot and would keep him around the first team depending on who we play, but I thought that away at Hull we created as many problems as we solved by having two defensive midfielders because of the poor ball retention. To be fair to Hughton he addressed this early on in the game.

where abouts were you thinking?

I would agree but I can''t think of any strikers who would be available/worth the money during the run in to the end of the season. I''m sure he has looked at it, but seeing as it isnt football manager its not so simple as just getting in a prolific striker that isnt wanted by his club.

http://www.errea.it/ENG/products/cat=sports-clothing/grp=football/idgruppo=100/idmacro=ABBIGLIAMENTO Here are some errea shirts. None of them really grab my attention.

When we signed him a lot was made of his passing ability while his weakness was strength/tackling.

I live next to the Broomhill Tavern which always has sport on. The sound isnt great but I guess thats probably the same anywhere.

I think hes a very good player. He pressurises very well, tackles well and has more strength than you would expect. He might not have the creativity of other players but does a great deal of legwork off the ball and hes a pretty important part of the team imo. From what I have seen of Hughes he isn''t a bad player, but people seem to think he is the answer to everything. We are third in the table so I don''t see why we would start changing the team that got us there.

Why is Adeyemi going to do better than Korey?

I would probably give them all a 9. MOTM would be a toss up between Lappin, Jackson and Crofts, but any of the others would deserve it too. Lappin edges it for me.

He did a brilliant assist for Jackson for the third goal which he deserves a lot of credit for.

Its only got us to third in our first run of games in a new division - we should clearly ditch it. Crofts has been player of the season so far for me.

Martin is a cracking player, our fans are just really fickle

Archant can''t take all the blame, after all its the fans that are slagging off the team all the time