David Kelly

I had my hopes on Jimmy Nail doing Big River and Ain't no Doubt. Maybe Ant and Dec will do Let's Get Ready To Rumble?

Decent apart from that god awful accent and the fact that they showed themselves up when talking about the 'Saudi money'. They clearly couldn't care one bit about where the money came from, they were just pissed off that we (and Forest) had money to spend like they had been able to for years because of Littlewoods. I

Wasn't last night in effect the same match (ie the one before the cup final) where Pope got sent off trying to do the same thing against Liverpool and ball dying in front of him and him handling it? I certainly had flashbacks of that watching it last night. Pope is without any doubt better at sweeping than Dubs.

In general I agree, but in that instance we'd fucked about with it so much, if we'd Allison in goal he'd still have had the fuck pressed out of him.

Bruno's post match interview has inspired me so I'm going to say PSG break the legs of Salah, VVD and Gravenberch tonight and we win when Pope saves the final penalty in the shootout from Trent.

To be fair to Pope, that freekick was an absolute abortion well before it got to him. And when it did he was immediately being pressured. He didn't do great with it but you have to look at the players in front of him making ridiculous decisions and poor passes first.

Apparently it's from a knock he took against Spurs which they didn't think was anything at the time. What I do know is that my mates son was in hospital the other week after doing his acl and the nurse there told them that Botman was in getting a scan that day and had been coming in every other day for them. They all thought it was just precautionary at the time.

If the latest rumours are true, it might be at Centre Forward.

I don't think we've ever conceded a goal because of Popes bad kicking and I don't see any concerns from the defence in using him (if anything I think they should show more concern instead of giving him unnecessary balls to deal with when they know he's not comfortable) but I would say Dubravka allows us to retain the ball better and move out from the back more successfully (although I think Pope actually started off two of the goals on Sunday with his distribution with the ball in his hands). Ultimately though I agree, Dubravka has been good enough and didn't need to be dropped. I would have agreed with bringing Pope back in if it was the 22/23 Pope, but the 24/25 Pope isn't playing to that standard. Confidence is perhaps more important for keepers than any other position and I don't think Pope has a great deal of it at the moment.

Oh and Dubravka knows what it takes to win a league cup final so that's another tick for him.

I think it's incredibly harsh to attach any sort of blame to Pope for the first goal last night, it went through two players legs, deflecting off the second. I think he may well have saved it a couple of seasons ago before his injury when he was on top form, but it certainly wasn't a mistake and I don't think I'm backing Dubravka to save it. Before his injury he was undoubtedly the better keeper which is why I think Howe still has him as number one and why I think he will be playing the rest of the season. That said, his form this season has been markedly worse than it was before his injury and Dubravka has stepped up from last season when he couldn't seem to save anything. I still don't think he's been outstanding, he kept clean sheets largely in games when the defence in front of him was superb or we blitzed teams and they got nowhere near scoring. But Dubravka is clearly playing better at this moment and I don't see how it benefits us to have Pope in ahead of him. Apart from anything else, the crowd reaction is doing him no favours.

Genuinely saddened by this. Just watched two of his lesser known gems, Night Moves and Twilight (not the vampire bollocks) and I don't think I've seen a film with him in where he wasn't outstanding. RIP.

Won't this just result in Joelinton being suspended for the final?

I have no problem with it but I suppose there will be supporters who have tried and been unable to get tickets for games that are pissed off that they have no chance real to getting to the final.

How many season ticket holders do we have now? You have to be one down to pot 5 but apparently only the first 3 pots are all guaranteed tickets. I suspect there will be a lot of people unhappy with the way they have split this, but I guess that would be the case regardless of how they split it.

The Kelly money won't (for the most part at least) hit until the summer so it's not a massive surprise.

I'd like to think so. I can't see us going for many mega money deals so being in a position to sign players relatively cheaply would make perfect sense.

I'm still not convinced it's quite that straightforward. I understand where those figures come from, but I get the impression it's not quite as easy as that.

And then still didn't use him (yes I know injuries played their part there). I think it was obvious to most that he was never going to be a player who could move forward with us so it was a strange signing. Wood is the only similar signing we made to Targett but we manage to move him on quickly. Every other signing we have made up to last summer have been with a much longer term view.

That approach is what has resulted in Targett still being here. Although we had the opportunity to send him back to Villa the first summer and bizarrely didn't take it.

Depends on how much you want to keep the supporters happy. There's already rumblings that the Saudi's have lost interest and leaks to the media about the ground redevelopment/new ground and training ground are all just smoke screens. Personally don't believe this is true but I can understand why others are thinking that way. The general lack of understanding of PSR isn't helping at all. I've heard lots of people say that selling Kelly for £20m immediately gives us £100m to spend in the summer but I'm pretty sure it's nowhere near that simplistic. I agree with toonotl that it's a difficult position as we can't just come out and lay our position wide open for all of our competitors to see, but I think some communication is needed. Howe is the only person we've heard from for ages and it's not his job to deal with this. I don't think it's a case of explaining why we didn't spend, but I think some communication would be beneficial.

I don't think you change central defenders if you can help it during a game (unless you have a big lead and want to give someone game time). Like you say, a consistent back four has merits, I'd go so far as to say it's more important than that. The bigger problem is that we really don't have any other players we can bring in without significantly weakening the team or even players we can bring off the bench to impact a game(particularly while Barnes is out). Basically we need the current starting eleven to the majority of the work and then use the subs to rest them when the game is virtually won.

I would absolutely love to call them up and say something like that. Almost enough to make me pay for them for them in the first place.

Been lods of shit on Twitter the last couple of days after the sky reporter started his report on Isak's second goal talking about how Arsenal fans want him. I see Downie has chirped in defending his colleague, which I get, but then tried to claim there haven't been loads of instances of sky trying to push him to Arsenal (or Chelsea or Manure or Liverpool or even Spurs ffs) to which he's been immediately shot down. The most disappointing thing he's said though, is that if it was his team, he'd see it as a compliment. Why the fuck would we see it as compliment when they're suggesting we can't keep one of our players away from a team that's only a couple of places above us in the league and who we have a massive cup semi final against next week. Yet again it shows the unbelievable bias they have to the former top six clubs. They aren't remotely interested in promoting any clubs. I find it more and more difficult every day to bare sky sports. Glad I pay them fuck all.

If Murphy can continue anything like his form from the last couple of months over the rest of the season it might prove to be a masterstroke that allows us to go all in on a new right attacker in the summer. If it goes wrong, it could result in us having a poor end to the season and losing Isak and maybe others due to the lack of Eurpoean football.