In the Premier League I would take 3 undefeated as almost as impressive as last season’s 25. I don’t mind doing the next one.
Ugo did well today, but he seemed very casual on the ball. Wasn't the burst of energy and progressive ball carrier we need. Fernandes has played DM before, and from his highlight videos he looks great at spinning on the ball and taking it 20 yards forward. He can also ping a long pass better than Downes or Ugo. Seems happy getting stuck in too. Maybe Flynn and Fernandes as the DM pair, with Dibling number 10?
Bit brutal isn’t it? Lots of people calling for him to make the team, he makes the team and now after one game calling to bomb him out straight away. Who would this be in view of getting in the side? Lallana I guess? Or someone else on the right ? I’m not sure I like the idea of changing a player for every sub par performance. From your words it didn’t sound like he had an absolute shocker and costed us a few goals. So dropping him seems a bit much. Unless you just mean rearranging how the 3 set up.
What?! I literally said, "He did well today". How did you interpret that as me saying, "He had an absolute shocker and cost us 3 goals"? FWIW I was neither for or against Ugo playing today. It would be nice to have a settled team for a few games, but we really need to find our spark as quickly as possible. Ugo and Flynn do a fairly similar job, and feel we still lack that burst of pace/early through ball that I think Fernandes can do. Also it would free up another position for an extra attacker.
Hold on, are we seriously saying that Lesley was under par today? He was excellent, really excellent, for most of the game before tiring a bit. He looked precisely the player we need which allowed Flynn to push forward more. In fact, for today's game at least, he was the dominant one of that pair. I don't get the levels of doom and gloom, other than the fact that we're a long way off an effective striker, and left wing still isn't right (there were periods of time in the second half where BBD was in acres of space on the left, to be fair to him, but we just didn't even try and find him. Everything went down our right). There were a load of positives from today, and had we not decided to do the world's ****test penalty, and actually scored there, we'd have won that. As soon as he missed (and you knew he was going to), the was a HUGE momentum shift in the stadium - amongst the players, the crowd, everything. But the fact was, up until that point we utterly outplayed them, our new players looked excellent, and the system was working. So there's something there to build on. I mean, it's a long shot, but to a person we pretty much all suspected we'd be relegated this year. If we can somehow bottle the play from the first 30 minutes of today, and somehow sort out a more effective defence, we actually have a very small chance. All the Martin Out stuff is a nonsense too. He's working this **** out real time.
Possibly. I mean, my point being is that there is a solution there, and if we stumble upon it, there's a half decent team in there.
I thought we'd get comfortably relegated before the season started and seen nothing yet to change my mind. Still relatively early days though. The next two home games will tell us a lot more about where we are and how Martin is doing imo.
