Howay

Are they certain this is the Chris Wood that played for Burnley? I knew he wasn’t great but fucking hell man the one on the pitch looks like he’s never played football

Think the linesman was being kind

It must be so fucking frustrating passing to these front three man. May as well pass right to palace, absolutely needs to be the priority this summer.

Can we just sub Chris Wood off? Pick a random bloke from the crowd and the result would be the same.

I just don’t get what the rule is any more for hand balls. His hand was away from his body and it blocked the path of the ball, I thought that was a pen under the newer rules?

I can’t wait until we have decent forwards. Brilliant move that let down by the cross country runner

Great run by ASM there though, Matty T put way too much on the pass

ASM is taking the piss doing that

I’m fine if people want to say he’s carrying an injury and that’s hampering his performances. It doesn’t really change my biggest complaint with him, and one he gets immense defence from the twitter crew, which is his tendency to just fucking burn off every time he gets the ball. Mostly a problem on counter attacks, of course I’m more than happy for him to run at the defence and if he sees a channel to exploit then attack it but he does this often in a head down fashion where even when he gets himself surrounded he just stubbornly tries to force it even when it’s just not going to happen, this ends up being a turnover with us on the defence again. The common theme I see is pictures of him alone with 4 blokes on him and comments of “if our team would give him support” there’s times that might be the case but by and large it’s bollocks and finding excuses imo. He’s logically the furthest forward in a lot of our counter attacking set ups, so when he gets the ball and just tears off the team aren’t going to be with him, if the options are closing he needs to learn to slow and shield the ball allowing our team to catch up then he can move the ball and retain it. It’s those type of decisions that he makes that frustrate me the most with him, especially when people want to create this illusion that everyone else on the team is always letting him down.

I think he’s fine as a squad player going forward but I personally don’t rate him highly. I also think we see a similar trend with him when a manager comes in that his performances pick up for a bit and he works harder but it eventually stops. It’s went longer with Howe as I think bringing in Bruno has shown him he will actually have to work to keep his place, so maybe it continues but it’s something to be wary of imo. I think the forward line is the major priority for this summer, so he might kind of keep his place because of that focus but we should definitely be looking to improve on him at some point in the near future.

Imagine the absolute meltdown if we went and spent a fucking fortune on 3-4 players of the Tripper/Bruno level early in the window . You’d have a special about it with Merson wearing his wonky glasses going: “I jast fink it’s a disgwayce Jeff, ow can they allow noocarsell to spend that much? If noocasell spend that then the Villa should be spending twice that”

Fully agree. That was my feelings towards the £60m noted, I think Staveleys comments kind of bit them on the arse during the January window and they struggled to agree sensible fees. I think an early move for someone like Tarkowski on a free would be good, it helps to keep some of these demands low (at first anyway as like you say once we pay a high fee it’s hard to lower that demand), it also strengthens our depth in that position. I agree about selling anyone as well. I keep seeing people dream up orders of “I wouldn’t sell him before this bloke was sold” but it doesn’t really work like that, if we can get a good fee for a player that we know we can improve on for similar then we do it.

League One fwends. It’s fucking class how desperate they are for everyone to love them but the opposite is always the case.

The 60m still just seems so low to me, given the high numbers all the “football finance” crew threw around in January. There was also a 20m payment into the club that was some kind of FFP loophole (can put 60m in that way over a 3 year period without it counting against FFP iirc), so that would mean ignoring that workaround under FFP we’d only have 40m available to spend? Just seems so low compared to the way others spend, including newly promoted sides.

They thought they were on a poor run at least, Bruce has opened their eyes to what is possible given absolute focus on doing fuck all.

I just don’t get how anyone can defend him in any way. Legitimately every fan base of every club he’s been at have exactly the same complaints about how their team plays, their lack of fitness, massive downturn in form etc yet there’s this need to blame the players first by some fan bases. I know our fan base also put some blame on the players but Bruce was always the clear main issue.

I saw one of them mention Pardew was better for them, totally forgot that particular member of the old manager compo club managed them and wondered how he got on: “On 29 November 2017, Pardew was appointed as the new manager of Premier League club West Bromwich. In his debut game in charge, the club drew 0–0 at The Hawthorns, against his previous club Crystal Palace. On 2 April 2018, West Bromwich Albion and Pardew mutually parted company after he had been manager for four months. At the time Albion had gone 10 games without a win, were on a run of eight successive defeats and were bottom of the Premier League.” sounds marginally better than Bruce tbf. How the fuck do these blokes keep getting jobs?

iirc there was a considerable amount of them on twitter and other places joining in the “no clue what Newcastle fans whinge about him for” sentiment when he signed for them. They deserve him for a while longer yet, similarly he deserves to have to have some type of obligation to earn his inevitable pay off even if it is just turning up to their matches.

Why would Burnley losing to Southampton calm him down? We’d still not be mathematically safe, which seems the only possible way he’d be happy we won’t go down if he doesn’t feel safe at the point we are now, which is that Burnley need 4 wins from 7 games to overtake us.

They’re on one today, jlaws knows everything because he’s worked with the PiF.

Aye it’s class. I absolutely despise this new trend on social media of “you celebrated like winning the CL”, it was leveled at us when we beat Burnley, and at Everton when they beat us, etc.

Spot on. It’s so fucking weird that on RTG they have this need to blame absolutely everything on others. If one of their fans had punched a horse, or put Saudi flags/defended that regime on social media they’d all be absolutely convinced it was sad mags pretending they were lads fans.