Trevor Hockey's Beard

I think the newly promoted clubs could be in big trouble if they fail to stay up. Cardiff seem to be like a kid with an addiction to buying Football Cards. they''ve just had a bid for Le Fondre rejected. How many strikers do they have on their books now? QPR showed that buying in good players at this stage isn''t always enough to keep you up. People keep saying that Hoots hasn''t worked out his best squad and formation yet - after 23 games - so what would have happened if we''d bought anyone major into the squad - a 15 game settling in period while he''s tried in every position except the right one. Of course I do realise that my words are tempting the fates to arrange for every new Cardiff striker to get on the score sheet tomorrow - lets just hope it''s into their own net.

Le Juge, that''s an interesting argument. Let''s leave this here and revisit it at the end of the season if it''s applicable.

Wow, 23 posts before saying something ridiculously stupid. I''ll make it 2 stupid posts in a row. Currently we have won 5, drawn 5, and lost 11. This suggests to me that by the end of the season we might be lucky to have won 9, drawn 10 and lost 19, which gives us 37 points. Will that be enough? Looking at our games this season so far, and given how we played in these games, if we had extracted a point from Hull, Villa, Chelsea, Fulham and Man U, then we''d be on 25 points and feeling a lot less dispirited.

I didn''t expect us to win today, but a few more draws over the last 21 games would see us in a very different situation in the league. By the end of the season it will be our inability to grind out enough draws which will send us down.

I say don''t sell. Now we are debt free £1.5 million is petty cash, and is what we would get for finishing 15th rather than 17th at the end of the season. If one piece of Wes''s magic proved to be the difference between relegation and staying up then he immediately becomes worth some £50 million to us. Fanciful? Well this line of thinking applied to Kamara last year with his goal against Everton having the effect of keeping us up IMHO. With our midfield injuries it would be foolish to sell Wes, and especially to a relegation rival who are managed by someone who knows how to utilise Wes.

Oh Goody, a statistics question. If you repeated the tossing of a coin for 100 times for a very long time you will get closer to the probability of each outcome... so most times will fall into the range of 40 heads/60 tails to 60 heads/ 40 tails, but some times the result will fall outside this range, and it is possible that you could get 100 heads, or 100 tails.. and of course it is possible that you could get that outcome the first time you try it. This an interesting analogy as results in the Premiership this season have been a bit like tossing a coin and I see no reason for that to change. We need some points soon to pull away from the bottom three, otherwise I fear that we could find ourselves in the thick of a relegation battle.

Yes indeed - great news for the club. I suspect that one of the few not to be enthused by your news is Lynn Truss, but I have long thought that she is a binner.

Even when Lambert tells "what really happened" how will we know it is the truth? Let''s hope he writes it down, otherwise I, for one, will be none the wiser. What does appear to be true is Lambert''s huge ambition for himself, and I think that his plan was always to move after one year in the Premiership - it just happened earlier than he anticipated. His impact at Villa has been such that his career appears to have reached a plateau. It''s still a NO to the OP.

Was that the Safri goal from a short corner at the Barclay End? The friend I was with had just said "Oh I hate it when they take the corner short, nothing ever comes of.."

Good points Bethnal and you may be right. I thought Sunderland created several good chances on Saturday, but Poyet may not be the man for the job. Pulis, on the other hand, may well be the right man for Palace and this could be another year where all three promoted clubs stay up - which then means we are one of five teams to fill the three spots.

Looking at the Villa message boards I have been surprised at some of their comments about Jumpship, including lack of tactical awareness and poor substitutions. I suspect that things will improve at Villa Park soon and he and "his team" will keep their jobs, but their impact has certainly been less than I expected. During those two years before he left I really thought of him and Brendan Rodgers as being equally good, but the latter has certainly done better for himself so far. To answer the question directly: NO. I think he would have failed to keep us up last year, and he has shown poor man management skills while at Villa when dealing with bigger stars. Bowkett described him as the most ambitious man he had ever met, and I for one am a bit scared of very ambitious people - I certainly don''t trust them to value "the greater good". PL back here (apart from never happening) would be a disaster - like pushing the self-destruct button.

It was interesting to hear the comments on MOTD2 last night about Spurs having made so many signings and how long it takes to both get them to gel and to work out what is the right line-up. They could have been talking about NCFC, but we haven''t blown £ 100,000,000. It really is turning into a very interesting season and no team is a cert to go down yet - anyone from Hull/AV could get the drop.

Hucks was great in our promotion year, but his pace was matched by the defences in the Prem. I seem to remember him being through on the goalkeeper away at Spurs and a defender (Ledley King?) came out of nowhere and tackled him. I agree that Redmond is the first player since Hucks to generate the same excitement and anticipation whenever he gets the ball. Redmond has the time and opportunity to develop into a better player than Hucks, but time will tell. For physicality on the wing who could match Trevor Hockey? I was on my feet every time he got the ball - along with everyone else not in the main stand.

I too have spent a long time sitting on the fence, but I do feel now is the right time to slip down off it. The current management team have assembled an impressive squad of players, and got us through last season, but this season is when "their squad" was meant to push on from last season''s survival. I have seen a lack of creativity and a lack of alternative ideas (as shown by the lack of substitutions at meaningful times in the games). Staying in this division is vital. Do Wigan fans still feel that their Wembley success was worth falling out of the premiership? Even if we do somehow stay up this year I can see no reason why next season would be anything other than another relegation battle and uninspiring performances. If Hughton and his sidekicks are an unbreakable unit then all three have to go. If it were possible I wouldn''t mind keeping Hughton, but the other two have to go.

What concerns me is our inability to draw games this season. Given how the games went we could have got a point from Hull away and Villa and Chelsea at home - and even Newcastle - you don''t always deserve the draws you get away, sometimes you have to steal them. It''s a simple equation: score more goals and concede fewer goals, but, unfortunately, the management team are as clueless as me as to how they can achieve that equation.

After repeated viewing I concluded that Hooper''s standing leg was taken out by the goalkeeper''s arm, so it was a penalty - and not a soft one as said by the pundits - but if I was a West Ham fan I would probably see it very differently. Staying in the PL is becoming more important with every season that passes. At the same time there seems to be an increasing number of poor refereeing decisions or plain mistakes. How long before a ref or the FA is sued by a club for a bad/wrong decision which gets them relegated?

Norwich Make Us Particularly Proud Everytime They Score. Oh dear that''s "Norwich Muppets". Scrap that idea.

Why don''t we repeat history and turn to a past player who''s a hero and loves the club so much they cannot turn down the job, despite the fact that it will tarnish their relationship with the fans and make them into a walking advert for dermatitis cream? How about Grant Holt or one of the Darrens?

Hughton has said that he doesn''t need a specialist message board coach; he is still trying to find the perfect combination, balancing attack with caution in the adverts, and once he does the performance(s) will come.

Robert Kett. Who can forget our great cup run in 1549 under his leadership. We defeated Northampton and Sheffield, but then came up against a strong Warwick side, packed with foreign players, and got slaughtered.

I thought I would have a look at the Premiership table for the end of the 2004/5 season and it makes for interesting reading. The top 5 are the usual suspects, with Everton at 5th, then 6th is Bolton and 7th is Middlesbrough. 11th is Charlton, 15th Blackburn and 16th Portsmouth. My point is that it is very hard staying in the Premiership, as Bolton and Middlesbrough show, and I do feel that staying up has to be our priority. Our second priority has to be staying free from debt and only after that should we start to worry about how we play. Will Birmingham and Wigan fans really feel, a few more years down the road, that it is better to win a cup and get relegated? Swansea have made it into Europe this year, but their domestic form seems to have suffered, for whatever reason.

It looks as if this could be a season where the results are much less predictable and teams beat sides they shouldn''t (on paper). This could be a season where 42 points are not enough to stay up.

Remember when we first came up we had some kind of record for the most consecutive penalties awarded against us. It seems that Hull took note and are looking to steal a penalty at every opportunity. The awarding of penalties has become a lottery and while people rarely agree with penalties awarded against their team we would probably all settle for consistency Compare and contrast the two penalty shouts away against Spurs in 2011/12 with the penalty away at Hull.

It seems as if, having tried everything else, CH ran out of options and tried what people have been suggesting on this board for weeks, ie Tetty and Fer as a pairing and Pilks and Olsen on the left. Now all he needs to try is Redmond on the right. I only saw the highlights of the Watford game, but both of the first two goals came from a pass/cross from Redmond on the right. Hooper''s first goal would not have happened with Snoddy on the right, because by the time Snoddy had got the ball, run a bit and then cut in Hooper would have been marked (that''s assuming Snoddy had managed to stay on his feet long enough to cut in and cross). I''m not a Snoddy hater, but he does appear out of form.

I never seem to get a mention, and then suddenly I''m all over the board like a shaver''s rash (although I''ve never had that of course).