Ray

DD, That''s a bit like asking how long is a piece of string, but in my opinion probably. He is only 19 but very self assured and focussed, I''ve seen him play alongside, Turner, Bassong and Bennett in the U21''s and he more than held his own, in fact if you didn''t know which of them were seasoned Prem players you may well have picked him out as the better player. He also went on the pre-season tour and started two games there, interestingly enough at RB. The step up from U21 to Prem is obviously a big one but I think he has the mental fortitude to deal with it and I know the club want to keep him here rather than send him out on loan, so I guess that means they rate him?

Let''s remember we have some very good younger players coming through. At CB we have Adel Gafaiti, only 19 and yet to feature other than on the pre-season tour but a player of the future and given that we have Bassong on a new contract, Bennett a young and burgeoning player and Russ Martin, an international CB it may well be CH feels we have enough cover without extending Michael Turner;s contract betond the end of the season.

Guys, Surely everone''s opinion is valid, to them, it may not be valid to you or anyone else but it is crammed full of validity to them, no matter what ''factual'' information is available, if they believe the earth is flat that is a valid belief to them. That''s what makes for debate and discussion, you may of course decide to step away from the debate and that in itself is a valid stance for you to take, valid to you that is and surely that is all that counts, isn''t it??

LDC, Well said Sir. IMO mamagers are sometimes afraid to let specialists in to help and imo many of them could do with some help themselves. For example, I''m fed up with managers saying publicly, "it''s a tough place to go" etc. Well there is certainly stability there because according to some every place is a tough place to go. They don''t understand that whilst they may (or may not) say something different behind closed doors, the players do hear the tough place to go statement and if they allow this into their subconscious it will priove them right and make it a tough place to go. An interview with Steven Gerrard comes to mind, when as captain of England before the game against France he was asked if he would settle for a draw, he answered "Yes", guess what we were one nil up and then were careless in possession and they equalised, final score a draw. Mr Gerrard got his wish. The same guy was aked how he rated his international career out of 10, his answer, "5". Now of course Stevie G is a hell of a player, but with a more poistive mindset could he have reached a higher level of stability. I suspect so. Mr Lambert, when at NCFC, was quoted as saying, and I paraphrase; "Who needs psychologists, I do all that" yet he employs specialist goal keeping coaches, defensive coaches, etc?? So why not a Mindset Coach, I suspect he knows more about goal keeping than he does about psychology, I could be wrong of course. Enjoyed this debate, so thank you. Here''s hoping our boys are expecting success at the weekend and prove themselves right!

Morning LDC, You wrote; I understand and agree that targets do work. However, my emphasis with the people I work with in music is on performance, as in reproducing your best when it really matters - something I know has a parallel in sport. The emphasis there, similar to sport, is being in the zone and as long as you are in that zone, or in the moment, you can perform at your best without any distractions. The emphasis is then less on target achieving and more being in the best possible state of mind to achieve whatever it is you want to achieve - and then all the peripheral stuff - like getting over nerves, pressure, expectations of others etc etc. - does not affect your performance. Getting in to the zone is another matter and I know a lot of musicians who use yoga and meditation as a way of quieting the mind - and it is interesting that a number of footballers are now starting to do the same - Ryan Giggs for one. Andy Murray does yoga for tennis too. This kind of thing is still quite new to football, but it is definitely something that is going to increase as time goes on, imo. My take on your comments is that essentially I agree with you about being in the zone and my definition of being in the zone (the fourth stage of learning) is unconscious competence. In other words what you do is driven by your subconscious. The debate comes in how do you train your brain into a state of unconscious competence and this is much of the work I perform within the world of sport (and commerce). Some use yoga and/or meditation some use other techniques, the point is you are manipulating your mind to work in a specific manner, to work for you rather than against you. The next stage is to get your goal setting and goal achieving abilities in the zone, then expecting success becomes in the zone thinking too. Once you have married all this together you become the sort of person who accepts full personal resposibility for where you are in life, given that sh*t happens, and you take full personal responsibilty for your individual performance within life, again given that sh*t happens, whether this be as a footballer, a musician, a pilot, a parent, a fan, etc. If you don''t do this and think that life treated you this way or that way and where you are in life is dictated by the actions of someone else, then you will be hanging about waiting for someone to take you by the scruff of the neck to re-adjust your lot, it could be a very long wait!! Anyway, the Zone I''m a great believer of the power of it and I am very happy that my expecting success thinking is in it and that is where I intend it to stay. Cheers. Ray

LDC, As promised a follow up post. I am too tired and emotional to do justice to your considered reply but will do so in the morning. In my morning post I will explore the point you raised re the ''zone''. Sleep well, I will!!

LDC, Intersting, however I am going for a pint or two now, so will reply later, whether this si more coherently or less coherently will correlate directly with the number of pints consumed. Cheers

Purple, I wouild prefer it if you refrained from deciding for me what points I understood/missed and didn''t. You have made an assumption. All I was doing in my reply to you was to pick uo and debate your comment about fear of failure. What I say may be irrelavent to you but it is relavent to me. I agree with you a que sere sere attitude could be be anti motivational, we perhaps disagree on what the alternative is, and it was this I was debating, perhaps I didn''t make this clear enough for you to comprehend, for that I accept responsibility. I hope I have cleared this up now.

LDC, I believe your point about targets to be pertinent. You may have gathered that I ''work'' with the power of the brain and have worked with Prem Players amongst other sportspeople. In one instance I was working with a forward who had set himself a goal of x goals in the season. Well this guy did very well and was one short of his target with 3 months to go, he asked me what to do, my suggestion was to increase his ''fervently'' desired goal. He said well what if I fall short, another player who was with us said, well if you fall short of the new goal you will have still succeeded in beating your original goal. The forward didn''t buy into it and consequently hit a drought until one game before the end of the season, when his brain kicked in from taking a break and said "OK we need one more to prove us right" he scored a screamer and ended the season on exactly the number of goals he set himself at the outset. He did of course receive a text from me, I can''t repeat his reply!! I am as certain as I can be that had he upped his target his brain would have worked tirelessly on achieving it. So when setting numerical targets we need to be careful, but there is always the argument that even if we finish 9th, when the goal was 8th, it is a success because who knows where we would have been if we hadn''t set the bar at 8th? All I know is I set myself goals, some numerical and some not, but as I know it works for me, I am more than happy if I hit 80% of my goals 80% of the time because I will have achieved more than if I had not set goals/targets.

LDC, When I refer to expecting success I don''t mean just because you do it will happen, what I do mean it is more likely to happen and of course we do not control the world but we do control the way we think about the things that happen in it. By expecting success you will naturally harness your brain to try harder, it''s how it is hard wired, hard wired to prove you right. Does it always do so, no, is it more likely to succeed - YES. A point I did not clarify is only expect success when you have some form of control of events, otherwise you are living in hope. So as a fan it could be argued you have no control so you are living in hope. The thrust of the point I was making is that if as a person you expect to succeed then the brain is more resourceful in making that happen, just as it will be resourceful in securing failure if that is the instruction you are giving it by trying to avoid the negative. I like this definition of an optimist; accept that things will go wrong but expect to cope, so if things go against you be positively discontent rather than p*ssed off as being p*ssed off only fuels the negativity. As far as defeating the fear of failure goes, I agree by having a mindset of extreme desire you do defeat the fear of failure by having an overriding success oriented mindset. I think we are sort of waging peace on each other here!

Purple, You brought up the fear of failure being a motivational factor, not me! So I replied to the point you made initially, isn''t that what constitutes debate? I agree with you fear of faiure can be motivational, buit as I said it needs to be handled carefully or it can come a self fulfilling phrophecy and nowhere did I say failure should not be punished, although I do believe if the mindset is of extreme desire then the player(s) will punish themselves without the manager having to do it and that will probably be far more powerful and have a greater impact. I''m not sure expecting success comes from arrogance, althouigh I do like your phrase ''admirable arrogance'' I prefer to think it comes from a strong and resolute self image and imo having a strong self image does not constitute arrogance. Success brings about a rising self image, failure has the opposite effect. In conclusion and to link the point of my comments to the original post, stability, imo, is far more likely if the players have an extreme desire for success than a fear of failure, which could turn them into shrinking violets, frightened to do anything.

Purple, The fear of failure can be a motivtional factor but imo it has to be handled very carefully, an extreme desire for success is surely a greater motivational factor. If the fear of failure becomes too dominant then the brain accepts this as its goal and sets off to fail (prove itself right), why, because the subconscious cannot accept the nagative or reverse of an idea. To prove the point, I am going to ask you not to do something, so steel yourself; "Do not think of an elephant" An elephant just flashed through your mind, very briefly possibly, but flash through it will have done, because the subconscious put it there before the conscious kicked in and rid you of it. Another example could be a Norwich team taking to the field against Liverpool with the mindset, we better not concede a hatful again against this lot again and we better not let Suarez anywhere near the ball. The pictures created by the subconscious in the brain will be a drubbing of a scoreline and Suarez banging a few in, so the brain sets off to prove itself right and by doing so instructs the body to cooperate it achieving it;s goal. So expecting succes has a far greater impact than trying to avoid failure.

Little Yellow Bird, Must admit I forgot about the xtension, may be just didn''t want to play second fiddle or is expecting a new manager or as you say he is entirely happy with the current one! Either way, glad he''s still here.

Little Yellow Birdie, Perhaps will will never know, but he was probably only wanted as a temporary stand in until Courtois is recalled from A Madrid, probably at the end of this season. So he would likely have been second choice behind Cech and then second choice behind Courtois, which of course does nothing for his longer term future and earnings. Also CH is very persuasive and is incredibly well liked as a person, so that may have played a part, plus of course the decision was made in the summer, when we were making ''stellar'' signings and all in the garden looked rosy.

Interesting reading. Personally I favour crossing from the by line as the ball is then (typically) moving away from the keeper and defenders and onto the heads of oncoming forwards, however, inverted or not, byline or cut inside, surely a professional footballer should be able to use both feet, I know there will always be a favoured foot but if someone offered me x thousands of £s per week I would damn well make sure I could cross a ball with either foot so I had the option to make the most of whatever opportunity was created or presented to me. It''s only a matter of practice, practice, practice, which then creates the neural connections (habit) in the brain to send the appropriate message to the body to perform the task.

NCFCStar, Please note I use the words, may be, I believe, I think and in my opinion, none of which pronounce me to be 100% factually correct, in fact I end by making that point. To anser your question why do so many people suggest teams give up when the manager loses the dressing room; who are these people, are they team members or outsiders like you and me? If outsiders then just like us they are guessing. Thank you for complimenting me on my good use of the English language, even if you think what I say is gibberish and condescending, however in my opinion, no more condescending than you telling someoene else they know nothing about football! Now let''s turn to what I do kow about you, you think a good team performance means the manager has not lost the team, that much I do know, I also know there are many exceptions to this, me being one of them (again thank you for the compliment of calling me commendable, it is much appreciated) and I agree it is naive to think everyone is the same and thank you for completing my argument. We are not all the same, so therefore it does not necessarily mean a good performance = the changing room is behind him, it could mean they 100% are not. So to make the point unequivocally as you did (in fact you did use the words "anyone who went to the Hawthorns on Saturday would realise", a tad patronising don''t you think) in my opinion shows a lack of a certain amount of understanding of the human psyche, however you are not alone, as I too am still learning. Once I consider myself ripe, the finished article, I will start to rot, whist still green I am still growing.

NCFCStar Said; "If you honestly think a determined defensive performance such as Saturdays is the result of ''50% of the dressing room lost'' then you really have no clue about football - however much you claim you actually do. Anyone who went to The Hawthorns on Saturday would realise that was a team who put 100% in you only have to see the celebrations at the end to see that." NCFCStar, In my opinion you may be creating a correlation which does not exist. You say about the previous posters that they have no clue about football, now I am not going to go that far about you but I will say I think you may have drawn a conclusion that isn''t necessarily correct and you lack a certain amount of understanding of the human psyche. Your conclusion that just because a team puts in 100% and celebrates a win means they are all behind the manager is flawed. They may all vehemently disagree with their manager''s tactics but out of respect to either him, or the position he holds, they carry on regardless. They also have their own prefessionalism to consider along with their own professional pride. I know I have worked for managers I really wanted to see the back of but it didn''t stop me performing at my best, for my sake or my customers sake, which in the players position would be the fans and there have been times when the team''s dislike of their manager actually pulled them together and drove them on. So, whatever the teams feelings about the manager are, it does not directly correlate to on field perfomance. So in conclusion, the manager may have lost 50% of the team, he may not of lost anyone or he may have lost 100% of the team, this doesn''t mean it will be reflected in our on field performance. IMO I think he has lost some of the team at the moment, but that''s just my opinion, which proves nothing to anyone other than me.

Dubai Mark wrote. "Respect your opinion, but PL did inherit a lot of quality, just decided not to use some of it.......he actually left a very limited squad for CH." He also left a very limited U21 squad, having released a number of players before he departed and the academy had to go on an extensive scouting campaign to effectively put a team together. Even Jamar Loza was released and the new regime managed to ''recall'' him. In fact I think I am correct in saying that last year we only had 6 or 7 players, outside of the first team squad, aged between 18 and 21 and 5 (I think) of them were signed at the start of the season. This of course meant that about half of the U21 team last year were in fact U18s. Many of these lads have now progressed to the U21 age group, so I believe the squad now totals 12 U21 players, so we still feature a few U18s in the U21 team. In fact we have only one 20 year old and three 19 year olds the rest are all 18, so considering their average age I think they are performing very well (9th out of 22 in their league) and only two teams in that league have conceded less goals per game than our boys, the leaders Fulham and Man Utd. Off post I know, but some people are calling for 3 or 4 transfers in in the January window, when in fact we have some very promising youngsters who could step up, as Josh Murphy has already, so we may not need to buy as big as some believe.

[quote user="Surfer"]" A big difference was the lack of Snodgrass. As good a player as he is, he slows our attacks down to a snails pace. Hence no counter attacking goals last season. " Not related to the difference between Wednesday and yesterday, but yes I agree with this, Snoddy is a very good player, but he doesn''t seem to fit the style of attacker we have in the squad, so I doubt that he''ll be back in the first team line up - at least for away games … but even at home I think he''s fighting for a place with Hoolahan...[/quote] And possibly young Josh Murphy, who has more pace and at equa, if not more, close ball skills and is far more likely to get to the byline, to feed RVW and Hoops.

Firstly, RM played about 1 minute, so not sure why he was include in OP post. however as I said in another post; Not sure the approach was chnaged too much from the Liverpool game, when we had more possession, more shots and more shots on target than we did against WBA. The difference was WBA don''t have the quality Liverpool have. So it could be argued that we perfromed better against Liverpool than we did against WBA apart from the fact our conversion ratio was better. We need to defend better and ensure more possession (the best form of defence being attack) in both these games we had approximately only half the possession we let the opposition have. Defending is the job of not just the defenders but the entire team, close them down in midfield and the defenders job is made easier, given the number of shots they had (more than Liverpool) I''m not sure we did that any differently yesterday. I''m not suggesting we change the players but we change the way we think about defending, which it appears we haven''t if WBA can have a higher possession percentage than Liverpool! So essentially I agree with Yankee''s point(s).

Some people seem to think.............................. But most just react to the latest result. "I think therefore I am" Rene Descartes (circa 1630) And it has taken us nigh on 400 years to get this far!! C''est la vie!!!

Sort of agree Citizen, but that may be because Liverpool have better defenders than WBA, the point I was making was a general one but we still had 14 shots at Liverpool against 8 yesterday and 5 shots on target at Liverpool as opposed to 3 yesterday! So the overall hit them on the break point you make was the same approach we took at Anfield, it just panned out better, possibly because we had Hooper on the field!!

LDC, Not sure the approach was chnaged too much from the Liverpool game, when we had more possession, more shots and more shots on target than we did against WBA. The difference was WBA don''t have the quality Liverpool have. So it could be argued that we perfromed better against Liverpool than we did against WBA apart from the fact our conversion ratio was better. We need to defend better and ensure more possession (the best form of defence being attack) in both these games we had approximately only half the possession we let the opposition have. Defending is the job of not just the defenders but the entire team, close them down in midfield and the defenders job is made easier, given the number of shots they had (more than Liverpool) I''m not sure we did that any differently yesterday. I''m not suggesting we change the players but we change the way we think about defending, which it appears we haven''t if WBA can have a higher possession percentage than Liverpool!

LDC, Like it by I would go further and play as follows; Whitts - 2 from Seb, Bennett, or Turner - Olsson Martin Fer Howson Murphy Redmond RVW (when fit) This allows the FBs to bomb on with RM dropping into a back three, the pacey tricky wingers with FB support can then get to the by line and cross with Fer and Howson getting up (quickly) to feed of RVW, plus of course the other winger with the unused FB dropping in to help cover the defence. Also allows us a back 5 with 3 CBs when defending, so we shouild themn eliminate some of the sloppy goals we have conceded. I would chose RM for the holding role over any of the other three CBs as he can take up a full back role if apprpriate and is probably better at reading the game (IMO)

Hi Kick It Off, Well that''s two of us then, only another 27,000 thousand odd to join in and we''ll have a groundswell! Either that or our manager is brave enough to give it a go, in which case only one to convince one. I think the easier job may be the 27,000!!