David Kelly

In terms of quality on the pitch he still owes a fortune though.

Not to mention the fact that Tino's delivery has been shocking this season.

Bang on. Despite the area's of the squad in which we are still limited, we have enough quality in players like Bruno, Tonali, Joelinton, Gordon, Willock, Barnes and Isak to do better than no shots on target against a team in the bottom 3 who are missing a few of their own better players. Howe has to take some criticism for this but it's not like we've not been able to create anything all season. We should have beat Brighton and had Iask's goal against West Ham been allowed, we could have easily had the success that Arsenal had on Saturday. I do have reservations about whether Howe is the right man to take us to the next level as it's obviously something he's never done before. Do we need a different type of manager? One who's got the ability and experience of managing teams to play to a consistent high level at the top of the league rather than just bringing out massive performances against the top teams. Maybe, but without a full squad of players at that level rather than Burn, Longstaff, Murphy etc. I don't think they'd do any better. The likes of Frank or Bournemouth's manager haven't done anything more than what Howe has here (remember where we were when he arrived FFS) so I can't see any reason to suggest we should be replacing him with one of them. Howe has to show he can get us back playing better and I'm sure he will. Longer term we might need to move on from him but he more than deserves the chance to improve on a bad week.

The difference being we don't have Shearer banging on about Mbeumo to us like they do with Merson with Isak.

He seems to be a strangely poor penalty taker when there is no pressure on but superb when it counts. From memory he has missed two for us, one was in a friendly and the other we were something like 3-0 up at the time.

Obviously we seen Burn do something similar last season. I know it's easy to get carried away when it's players for your team do anything positive and I'm sure the mackems will have their own take on it, but there definitely seems to be some really good personalities in our club now. Not forgetting the genocide of course.

Getting wound up by perceived wrongs is one of the things that makes you a mackem. It's like fucking seagulls, defending nonces, casual racism, shitting in your seat at the ground and marrying your sister/mother. It's in their DNA.

To be fair most of Sunderland is like it's still 1992. Well the better parts at least!

Davis can certainly finish going by last weekends game.

I'm all for picking players on form, especially going into tournaments. But I just think that form needs to be longer than a month. As I said though, it shows how limited our options are in that position. If we had fit and quality leftbacks I'm sure he'd have been held back longer.

It says a lot about both the lack of genuine options at leftback and culture of over hyping players when they have a few good games. For the first month or more of the season he couldn't nail down the spot ahead of Kelly as he was anything but consistent. He's been one of our best players over the last month or so, including MOM performances against sky six teams, but should that really be enough for a call up to the national team? Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy with the way he's progressing now, I just feel that more than a handful of good games should be required to play for your country.

Hard to believe I know.

I don't think Howe see's it that way or we would have been after one by now. I don't think we've ever been seriously linked to a player of that type while Howe's been here.

When Longstaff first came into the team he looked like he was a midfielder to sit in front of the back four, but once he returned from the injury he had, and particularly under Howe, his game has changed. I don't think any of our midfielders look like the type to sit but I also think players like Bruno and Tonali are intelligent enough to be able to adapt to do that role if that was what was asked of them. I don't think Howe asks this though. We've seen games where we have massive gaps between the defence and midfield and we've been easily played through and we've struggled. But those occasions have been far less then the times when our set up has worked well for us so I don't think Howe see's a need to change overall. I do think he sees a need to adapt against the better teams though which is what we've seen this last week. I just think he needs to be a bit more flexible more often.

Totally agree with this. So far Howe has stuck to his system and it hasn't suited Tonali at all or Barnes other than for coming off the bench (which isn't necessarily a bad thing for us but I suspect will piss him off sooner or later). I am a bit more hopeful that going back to Joelinton and Willock on the left, will allow Tonali to work but we'll have to see where that goes.