The Journalist

Fond memories of Aldershot - one of my early BBC commentaries was there. They beat Bristol Rovers. Good times. (I was impartial throughout, obviously)

As you say, while all the footbally stats are pretty similar, one bit I would be interested in is the average age of the starting XIs fielded in the first part of the season compared to under Manning. It feels to me like we’re fielding more experienced teams with fewer minutes for some of our academy players, but I may be wrong…

He only didn’t dismiss THG because he didn’t see it!

Perhaps. But to use your own reply below… Cresswell’s holding could be deemed as clumsy. but not deliberately violent. The retaliation was deliberate. Violent conduct. Straight red.

It's fantastic to get through and I thought the club showed up well on the big stage - a proper cup tie, a proper atmosphere and the first proper shock of the third round. I actually thought we were quite poor in the first half - we broadly defended well but still conceded a couple of very good chances and struggled to string two passes together. We didn't deserve to go in ahead and it was probably the worst of the four halves we played in the tie. But I thought we looked much more aggressive after half-time, played forward quicker and offered so much more as an attacking force. That was pleasing because if we'd come out after the break just thinking "keep it going, more of the same" it would've caught up with us. The sending off obviously helped us but even before that we had more intent. And, from the red card onwards, we generally had pretty good control. It's worth saying that, sat in an office full of neutral and mostly EFL club-supporting fans, the consensus was Joe Williams probably should've been booked on three occasions (although none of us were convinced the first-half challenge was a straight red card given his foot hits the ball, rolls over it and bounces up - it definitely looked worse on the slow mo) and Taylor Gardner-Hickman should clearly have been sent off for swinging his arm at Aaron Cresswell. Both were pretty lucky.

To sum up… on the face of it a good signing for the team, but nobody can be convinced it’s a good signing for the club. We’ll wait and see, but the optics are odd without knowing more at this point.

I think you’d say Kalas was successful, albeit the way it worked out at £8m probably not value for money!

Dasilva is a good shout! Palmer! Of course - mind-boggling. Bang average on loan, well stocked in his position and cost a fortune… and we still signed him. Arguably even worse than Tomlin and Dinning for that reason!

Ah, I’m too young for that one.

I can only really think of Tony Dinning and Lee Tomlin as bad loan-into-permanent deals - are there more? That said, can anyone think of any successful loan-into-permanent deals we’ve had?! There’s probably some obvious ones…

£42,500. Better than a slap in the face.

I know you’ll all moan but the coverage will be as biased towards us as possible, I promise.

Having rewatched it a load of times this morning - agreed, I was a bit harsh. He has to drill it like he does to get it through, it just asks a lot of Conway and his touch was perfect. Still, I stick by the thing about Conway’s likeness to Maynard - he’s one of the best ‘shooters’ we’ve had in my time watching City. And I specifically say ‘shooter’ rather than ‘finisher’ because being able to convert crosses/score from close range/finish with one touch is a different skill which, say, Abraham was brilliant at… but I don’t think he struck a ball as cleanly as Conway. I know what I mean even if nobody else does!

Conway’s touch turned an overhit pass into a perfect pass. And he’s the best striker of a ball we’ve had since Maynard IMO.

Well done all. It was fun getting to actually watch us for work - the consensus in the office was that we gave it a good crack and were basically everything Sunderland should’ve been yesterday but weren’t. Hope everyone enjoyed the BBC coverage - Bristol City were the lead story for a bit, with Tommy’s happy little face splashed everywhere I could justify…

Just following Robbored‘s advice.

Another illustration of why changing managers was so utterly pointless. Mid-table squad, mid-table results.

There aren’t many games at this level that - relatively speaking - are there for the taking but within the opening 10 minutes that felt like one of them. That said, if you’re not at your best and can’t find a way to win make sure you don’t lose and we never looked like conceding, which you can’t often say about us with the score 0-0 away from home. If we want to be a “top-end team” (not my words) we’ll need to add a couple with genuine technical ability in the middle third IMO.

Think we’ve controlled the game without having any real cutting edge. That said, if Mehmeti scores one of his two very good chances we’d all be describing it as the perfect away performance so far. I’ve not seen us much under Manning so far - we seem more patient in and out of possession and less aggressive in and out of possession. Not saying one is better than the other, but that would be my observation at a very basic level.

Worth saying that a journalist has basically just transcribed his answer to the first question of, I suspect, a five-minute post-match interview so there's at least a couple of lines of quotes on the website. He may well have said plenty about other stuff. Funny how people get their knickers in a twist about this stuff, though.

Probably stems from the current team being below average and under-invested in, an ownership that’s losing interesting and a new robotic manager who fans are struggling to connect with. None of that is the fault of the supporters. Nor the media team, to be fair.

Weirdly, I always favoured the Goodfellow equaliser. I’d been to every home and away game that season and, having lost to Cardiff 12 months earlier, that horrible sick feeling in the pit of the stomach that it was all fizzling out to a home defeat by Hartlepool… I’ve never felt relief like it when the equaliser went in. And, from the moment it did go in, I had no doubt we’d go on to win it in extra time. The Manchester United game was an all-round amazing night. The buzz around the ground… you felt like everyone genuinely believed we could do something special. It’s hard to explain it to a non-football fan, it was just something else (and was never there for the Man City home game IMO). On a personal note, also memorable because I couldn’t get a ticket so twisted some arms to get in the overspill of the press box, wrote the match report on a jolly and it ended up getting read by 3.5 million people. Not normal numbers for a Bristol City match report!

I’m sure we’d find a way of wasting it.

Like many, many players and managers, Liam is clearly just media trained up to the eyeballs. He's so polished... I think it's just particularly jarring to us as fans because Nigel was the polar opposite. There are very few like Nigel who are authentic and say what they actually think, rather than say what they think they should say. Ange Postecoglou is probably one of the few other examples in England at the moment? Either way, they're outliers in that respect. Nonetheless, I do feel a bit sorry for Liam at the moment. He's had an iffy first six games and already he's getting his post-match interview technique pulled apart, eye contact analysed etc etc. A good time, then, to remind everyone this is all on the Lansdowns and Tinnion, not the new manager.

Still pretty extraordinary how all this panned out, even by our own standards.