And Its Smith

His fault for their third

Pearsons tactics when we need a goal is put on four strikers and smash it long and I can’t ever remember it working

Smashing it long isn’t working. Strange tactic

Semenyo isn’t a striker they score goals with another! Come on !

What do we deserve with defending like that?

Didn’t you say you were turning off to watch the Man City game?

We are fourth and have some fans giving up on us when we go 2-0 down to top of the league. Unbelievable really.

Hard to get a point from here

Long lost friends Nige and Craig Shakespeare

Airport shut tonight

Omobamidele best centre back I’ve seen at this level for a while. Good test for our strikers

Not heard of an injury and it is odd if he misses out for King when we have Williams and Massengo on the bench. Guess he must be injured

Ben Roberts is regarded as one of the very best in the business. Would be interested to know how much he is on as a goalkeeper coach of a top premier league club. Wide held view is he has improved many keepers over the last 5-6 years at Brighton, Charlton and Yeovil and now gets to improve Mendy and Kepa at Chelsea. One thing that bugs me with punditry is when former players who never played in goal give a view on a keepers performance. Almost always getting it wrong. There aren’t many ex keeper pundits out there but the ones that are always talk sense as they know what they are talking about, with it being such a specialist position. A lot of pundits will call a shot unsaveable when it isn’t (usually missing a lack of keeper foot movement or a keeper not far enough off his line) and blame a keeper when they’ve had no chance.

Absolutely. I remember seeing an advert for our under 23s manager position a few years ago and it was £35k per year. That is a very important role!

Surely you can appreciate that clubs need goalkeeping coaches? Outfield coaches cannot coach goalkeepers. Even independent academies have goalkeeper coaches to coach and improve their under 11s keepers. Very much a specialised area and certainly as much a full time job as an outfield coach.

England v India Thursday. T20. £20 per adult and £19 per kids. Tickets left and all unreserved. Good value for money

Some will know I’m an xG sceptic. I don’t mind the principle behind it but find the execution someone too flawed to prove reliable. However, I know that some people take a lot of notice of it so thought I’d share this that some might find interesting. It would suggest, if you believe in xG that we are currently overperforming and may well ‘regress to the mean’ (an annoying phrase that gets used a lot nowadays) at some point. The caveat is that 8 games isn’t a lot to go on. It certainly doesn’t feel that we are getting more points from games than we deserve

My suggestion would be to simply not click on his threads if you don’t want too

He’s 25 though. Little bit of a different situation

Fair point. I think one can try to judge who will go furthest in the game though. I can see Alex Scott playing for England but I wouldn’t say Semenyo would get to that level necessarily even if he was eligible. Think he will be good premier league player though

Alex, Antoine, Tommy, HNM

An incredible summer. Beat world test champs and number one team in the world in one summer and also India in one off test. And this team is far from perfect as well so can improve

I reckon Lees might get dropped from the team before Crawley does.

My use of the word ‘if’ was not used to cast doubt. I very much believe it happened. My son had his first game of the season last weekend and it was depressing to be back running the line for his team. We’ve just come off the back of a delightful cricket season where we had one incident of dissent in about 18 matches. First football match, the 16 year old referee gets a ton of flack for a decision that he got correct as it happened 6 yards in front of me! The dads of the opposition had an awful angle of it but it didn’t stop the abuse. And regardless of if it was the correct decision or not it shouldn’t happen. I then speak up and tell them to mind their tone and language and then I’m in the firing line!

If a group of men are surrounding the car of a ref for an under 12s game (or any age group) then I’d suggest they have huge emotional issues and are likely to have been violent in the past. Their kids and/or partner probably live in fear.