We'll score, we always do. They are struggling to score, so I can't see past a win for the Lads. It's just a question of how many chances we take. I think It'll be a comfortable 0-2. I'm hoping we're 2 up by the hour mark, to allow us to bring on Watson for Mundle and Connolly for Roberts, so we can see how we fair playing Isidor out wide. Would like to see Aleksic get a 15-20 minute run out replacing Riggy and Browne giving Jobe a 20 minute break. We'll need to put our first eleven out against Preston, who are starting to find a bit of form, so any rest we can give our players on Saturday, the better it will be for midweek.
Has anyone stated when this was diagnosed? The reason I ask is that it would be pretty irresponsible of the club to send Riggy to 'Psycho Path' to have the **** scared out of him after being diagnosed with a heart problem. That was only a few days ago.
IF this is genuine, thank **** we’ve got this referred before anything horrific happens on the pitch.
Ah well.... Just praying it's not true, both for the lad, his family and the club. Tomorrow's team news will give us a bit of an insight. If he's missing, then the club might release a statement to explain his absence and whether it is likely to be long-term.
I honestly believe we should wait for a club announcement before we dissect this any further.* Whatever the case we know the club will look after any player and, in Rigg's case, he has all the time in the world. In my opinion, if this was anything serious, the club wouldn't just be putting Rigg into the usual queue at A&E ... he'd have gone to a specialist hospital. That'll be my last word until things are clear ... ... he's a fit young lad, this is 2024 and we have a match tomorrow afternoon. *Just my opinion, not trying to own the narrative.
Hopefully just a precaution. Remember when PVA was out with a heart issue and there was nothing wrong with him
I remember when Jack Rodwell was checked and they couldn't find one ... ... no sign of a backbone either.
Spot on. We all know the dangers of Social Media. If there's anything to be said, it should be by the club with the expressed wishes of the family.
ALS: SAFC Fanzine OPPOSITION VIEW: QPR On the back of three wins in a row we travel to West London to play against a QPR side fighting the drop. Here's what the Queens Park Rangers' fan website Loft For Words had to say when we asked them about the game: After finishing last season so well, you're second-bottom this season with just the one win. What's been the story of your season so far? Frustration. Bad luck. Growing concern. Fading hope. With the profile of signing we made over the summer it was always going to take some time for this to work – if indeed it ever does work. Sunderland have had some recent experience of this of course, but it’s very difficult to go out and make ten analytics-based signings from backwater European leagues, all but the goalkeeper under 25, sling them all into a Championship team and off you go to the races. There was/is genuine empathy and understanding from the support base that this would take a bit of time. On top of that, we’ve lost our best player Ilias Chair, our most violent midfielder Jack Colback, and our best defender/only left sided defender Jake Clarke-Salter for long stretches to injury and suspension. So, on top of trying to bed in all the analytics boys from Europe, that’s three of your better players, three of your most experienced Championship players, right down the spine of the team, missing all at once. With Clarke-Salter in the team, for instance, we’re unbeaten in eight. And while I know this is a bit ‘auntie, wheels, bike’, but play the Plymouth and Hull home games like that again, 100 times over, I think QPR win those games 95, 96 times. Some of the goalkeeping was ridiculous and with one or two fewer saves we’d now be 14th/15thish, one win from the top ten, and everybody would be a lot calmer. What was the aim before a ball was kicked? Was it purely to avoid relegation again or did you expect to push further up the table? I expected more. And perhaps that’s the problem, I’d allowed myself to believe. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. We’ve just had a dreadful two and a half seasons. At one point we won six and lost 31of 49 games. We’ve won 13 of our last 50 home matches. That was driven, in part, by us spending all our FFP headroom trying to push for promotion under Mark Warburton in 2021/22, bombing in the final third of the season, and sacking him. We then doubled down again with the spend with Mick Beale, one of several botched managerial appointments. The hope was if we could just stay up last season then we’d have some more FFP headroom to work with this summer as the overspend rolled out of our three-year calculation, seemingly a very good manager, and we might be able to push on. Not push on to anything like the top six, but just the dizzying heights of sort of 10th/11th/12th, which I think last year was Preston, Bristol City and Cardiff. The bar for success at QPR is ridiculously low after the purgatory we’ve been through - if you basically do as well as Preston North End did last season you’d be hailed as some sort of soothsayer. Given the way we finished last season, beating Leeds 4-0 to torpedo their promotion push the hilarious highlight, that didn’t feel like too much to hope for. It can still happen. Some of the new signings settle in and get up to speed, some of the injured players come back, we get a bit of rub of the green with a few spawny results that boost confidence… But it can also go to **** too. The team’s losing confidence, and we’re picking injuries up faster than we’re getting players back. What do you think of manager Marti Cifuentes? Still a big fan, though he’s done some odd things and made some strange choices this season. What’s also worth saying at this point is that there’s been a lot of change behind the scenes at the club. When we were circling the drain last summer, the club brought in a company called Retexo to audit the business and basically tell our wonderfully benevolent owners where they were going wrong. Retexo say they “evaluate existing sporting and commercial structures and advise upon areas in need of greater structure”. So, yeah. Impressive client list, Roma etc. Six months into that, the club announced the director of football role previously held by Les Ferdinand and the CEO role previously held by Lee Hoos (ex Burnley, Southampton, Fulham, Leicester) was being amalgamated into one, big, football-focused CEO role and given to the 26-year-old Retexo rep who’d been doing that audit – Christian Nourry. *Marge Simpson grumbly noise.* It’s all been a bit Jake Humphreys so far. We have an assistant performance analyst, a lead performance analyst, a head of integrated performance, a performance nutritionist, a head of performance services, a physical performance coach, a performance logistics and player care lead, and a director of performance. So, you lot better watch yourselves, some actual performances are presumably just around the corner. Nourry’s inexperienced, he’s very confident, he’s got all the chat and if there’s one thing QPR are really prone to it’s being taken in by people who good chat who can tell this ownership what they’re doing wrong and how they will fix it – Mark Hughes/Mike Rigg/Kia Joorabchian, Harry Redknapp, Steve McClaren, Mick Beale… But it might still work. It’s very early days. That low bar for success is well in his favour. He could finish 12th this season, and half these signings we’ve made using this model could be complete failures, and that would be seen as a success, as long as three or four of them become good Championship players and one of them gets sold for some money. That’s all well within our reach. All of this means that, at the moment, the attention is very much focused on how the club is being run, the weirdly cloak and dagger way it’s now communicating with us, who signed these players and how they were identified, and very little on Cifuentes. Whether that will sustain a few more defeats hopefully we won’t have to find out, but I suspect in that case the fire will be very much trained higher up with the credit Cifuentes has in the bank from last season. Jack Colback is still part of the QPR squad, obviously we hate him but what do you guys make of him? Got sent off at Sheff Utd for abusing the match officials twice in a minute over a free kick that was a free kick. Injured basically ever since. This liability with referees, and dodgy fitness record, meant at the end of August most fans were done with him. However, nothing makes you a better player for QPR more than not playing for QPR. The more we lose while you’re injured/suspended/out on loan, the closer to Adel Taarabt you become in the collective mindset. Our midfield without him has been embarrassingly powderpuff, so now the general consensus has swung round to Colback being important and the team missing him. Which he is, and they are. How about former Sunderland loan defenders Jimmy Dunne and Jake Clarke-Salter? Jimmy Dunne’s a right back now, father. Jake Clarke-Salter I’m aware didn’t have a good time with you at all, but when he’s fit to play for us he’s one of our best players and, in my opinion, one of the better left-sided centre backs in the league. The problem is that availability. He managed 29 starts and four subs last year, which was a career high. He’s been missing with the same calf problem he keeps coming down with again already this. The reason he’s playing for QPR and not somebody higher up is his fitness record, and our chances depend on how successful we are at chipping away at that. We’re a thousand times better with him in the team. Who is your best player? Ilias Chair, probably, for all the frustration about him holding the ball too long and being too selfish and slowing things down etc etc. There are high hopes for two of the other midget gems we’ve got to flit around in that ‘ten role’ – Koki Saito and Karamoko Dembele – but we’ve only seen flashes so far and the wisdom of trying to play with several five-foot-nothing players in your team in the Championship is open to debate given the way we’ve started. Which Sunderland player worries you the most? Well, I know what the actual/conventional answers are, but it’s always angelic ****house Luke O’Nien. Runs all day, tackles anything that moves, plays anywhere he’s asked, team over self. Makes me sick. I think every club and squad needs a character like that, every team needs a player like that, and QPR don’t have one. Don’t have one, despite the actual El Guapo playing just down the road from us at Watford, Wealdstone, and Wycombe where he was repeatedly available for free, before going to the other end of the country for a few hundred k. I know he’s going to wind me up, I know he’s going to dive about, I know he’s going to waste time if Sunderland are in front, I know he’s going to pretend to be injured if he thinks it would benefit you from the play being stopped, I know he’s going to walk very slowly to the touchline then sprint back on, I know he’s going to try and referee it. I know I’m going to lose my ****. I know I’m going to hate it. I can hear myself already. And I know I’m going to wish he was doing it all for us instead. After earning a draw against Burnley last weekend, are you slightly more confident about facing us? Having triumphantly marched into the fires of hell itself and steadfastly faced down the notorious attacking might of Scott Parker FC, confidence in our brave lions is positively overflowing. What's your prediction for the match? Somewhere in the region of 12 bottles of Peroni, and a row with some pink-trousered hero who’s come to the pub to watch “The Autumn Internationals”. Finally, where's the best place for a travelling Sunderland fan to have a pint? It’s London. It’s difficult to go wrong. Although going in the places round the Green where the police tend to park the away fans is one way of doing so. please log in to view this image
Great thread as always RTB. Long day travelling apologies. Well after a couple of weeks in the Highlands I'm happy to say I'm looking forward to being back on the road tomorrow for this one. (Well Train).These types of games can be potential banana skins but I think our professional approach means we will have prepared well for this. I would always take a point away from home but just feel we have more about us this season. Be happy with a point but just fancy us to nick it. 4 points from tomorrow and Wednesday would do just fine. Keep the faith lads and lasses.
