Everton, WBA & us have had a similar day. But, it feels less like a blip for us. We've been warming up to today's performance.
I am prepared to get shot down, but apart from Gabbadini and VVD most of our signings in the last two seasons have been failures.
I was hoping that we would get Silva in as well, but i think Watford were very quick to act and got him in quickly before we even knew what to do with Claude. In the 1st half i thought we were being more direct and trying to knock balls to him quicker than normal. That didn't work either .
I'm normally hugely positive and can pretty much always find something good, even in defeat. Struggled today hence my grumpy posting today. Apologies for that, normal happy clapping service will hopefully resume shortly.
Very much the same for me. I always try to find a positive to have something to cling on to if nothing else. I'm not too disheartened yet but we need to see some personnel changes/tactical changes from Pellegrino in the coming games.
Against Juanmi, Pierre, Pied, Boufal, Redmond, Austin. Also Romeu was more than two seasons ago as we signed him on loan. I think Lemina and Hoedt are too early to judge, although the signs are promising. Where is our much vaunted academy as well?
To be fair Redmond was our leading goalscorer last season, so you can't say he has been that "bad" of a buy. We bought Romeu for £5 million in the same Summer we bought VVD and Cedric.
Yes but we knew what we were buying with Romeu as we signed him on loan the season before. So in my defence I don't think I will count this, he is a good player though. Redmond may have been our best scorer, but as my Dad use to say, 'in the land of the blind, then Cyclops rules'. He didn't have a great target to beat. I think our blackbox needs a major firmware update
We didn't sign Romeu the season before. We bought him in 2015 for £5 million. Typical Saints signing, lost his way at a big club but had potential, which he is now showing for us. You sure you're not thinking of Bertrand the Summer before?
Blackbox, attacking mid, new signings, these are not things we need to focus on. We've got what we've got, we need to assemble something resembling a team, and quick. Once the games get hard, they stay hard.
We kinda need to stop saying "we should have signed an AMC" now. We all know that. The key is working out how we get the bunch we have ticking.
Indeed. The time to focus on new signings has come and gone. Les has seen to that. Focus now needs to be on trying to make the best of a bad hand. We're playing with one hand tied behind our backs now until January - arguably both hands - so we need to try and come up with a way of damage limitation for the next four months. And it needs to be quickly, given how difficult the fixtures get come Nov/Dec time. I suspect it won't be pretty, but it can't be worse than today. It's why I said earlier I'd been thinking about alternative personnel, tactics and formations. Whether that's Long. Whether that's wing-backs. Whether that's two up front. Whatever. And as you suggested earlier, it possibly has to include Virgil coming back into the side earlier than I'm sure would be expected.
Kinda like what happened with RK when we went on that horror run - he almost lucked into the new formation that got us firing again.
Sorry he showed promise when he first joined us, but didn't do a lot apart form show how bad his shooting and passing abilities are
Get Lemina and maybe VVD in against Palace, and give the front four some more attacking freedom and licence to roam.
