OTF

It's like starting from scratch in the play it out from the back stakes, have already gifted them two chances. The three you've named all look nervous as on the ball....

Damn, Isak should have scored that.

Lascelles still Lascelling.

Resurrection of the Matt Ritchie 'one of the best left feet' piece of commentary. Reckon there must be a fair bit of dust on that one.

Let's see if Botman can help Lascelles at all.

The good thing about the system is the better you get at it, and the better the players enacting it are, the less work you need to do. I don't think Tielemans or Maddison would have trouble with it.

If they're the same price Maddison, if Tielemans is a fair whack less due to when his contract expires, Tielemans who is also younger. They're both quality so we'll get neither for cheap unfortunately and they'll be looking for a nice bump in their wages.

And they're thick enough to think that if there was people who came to watch them on the back of the Netflix doco (that showed how abjectly terrible they were from top to bottom) that they'd be doing it more than once. Because as we know people get season tickets to the circus.

Completely forgot about Lewis. What a dud signing he's turned out to be.

Not bad, maybe drop Trips out for Ritchie. Huge drop off but do we want to risk our aging talisman? Botman, Joelinton, Willock are young enough to recover fast enough to start again against Leicester.

We'll need to at last have some quality through the middle if we want our class to shine through. We have a pretty steep drop off to our second string. If nothing else it will be interesting to see how Howe lines us up, it will largely come down to availability beyond the first team. Elliot Anderson, Murphy, Manquillo, Lascelles to start, I also think we might see Ritchie in at left back so between him and ASM there's not a great deal of defensive nous. Dubs couls be back in goal. If Wilson has no injury concerns I'd possibly start him to help with his sharpness and take him off early second half but we're much much more likely to see Wood starting as there's no risk involved.

Whoops, I didn’t read the title and figured incorrectly that this was the league cup QF. I stand down from my official position on the forum is what I'd be saying now if I had a position.

Yep, my bad. Ok rest every fucker in this one then play them against Leicester in the Carabao and Fulham in the Prem.

I wouldn’t be changing the defense unless they have knocks. We don't play again for a week so there's plenty of time for recovery before we host Fulham.

That'll be the sister city alliance with the mackems ruined then. Another team turns out to have no class, that's them off the christmas card list. FTM

It' working 🤪

It's hard to tell these days.

It's against the spirit of the game to defend against your opposition's best players. I expect we'll be fined heavily for it and Howe may cop a suspension.