cityexile

Minor observation, we will finish the season in the top half.

Huddersfield (as good) as down. Looks to be between Birmingham and Plymouth. Would need both to win to drag Sheff Wed back in to it. Can we finally flush them Bham down the bowl?

Entirely agree they are poor. If I am splitting hairs, they concede about 2, but also score about 0.75 a match. So winning by 2 is above average. But yes. Job done (so far).

Wed now three up…and still not safe as things stand. Is anyone in the POs actually in form?

For sure. Can only beat what is in front of you of course and we deserve to be ahead.

So far…

We are going 11th, say we are going 11th…

Twine! What we were told he could do from FKs.

Cardiff two down. Just need to bring this one home now lads.. Wed go two up!

Huddersfield! 1-1.

Yep, it would need a lot of infrastructure put in place, live feeds to VAR teams etc. Would need a lot of planning.

I mean, it’s alright? No more than that. At my one look a somewhat soft penalty, but we have created a bit more and deserve just to be ahead. What we all expected pretty much. TC getting in good positions, but not looking sharp with the finishing.

Birmingham one up. Boo!

The real battle in this league is between us and Cardiff.

On stream, it looked a dive anticipating contact.

Got to say, would have moaned if it had been given against us.

1-0

Not kept them that busy. No goals at all so far. Having said that Sheff Wed just pop one in. And Swansea.

I would not be too disappointed to see Leeds go up, for the simple reason they always seem to beat us!

We can only go ahead of Cardiff tomorrow. 8th is the mathematical highest we can finish if most of those lose two matches.

Joe Jordan enters the chat…

I don’t mind a team built around a defence that is rock solid. The closest we have got to that, and your results, is that GJ season. It’s not end to end, but being able to defend like demons is also enjoyable in its way. You come away believing you deserved the 1-0 because you gave the other team nothing. That is different to 1-0 wins where you give away too many chances the other team just misses. Sooner or later you will revert to the mean.

Stating the bloody obvious, but it would be quite the effort to not get 50 points when at the moment you are now 44 points off 31.

When people talk about ‘Manningball’ I assume they mean the possession based patient build up style, that takes a low risk approach to losing possession and getting caught in transition. More Man City, Leicester, Southampton than say Ipswich, Leeds, Liverpool. Its a scale of course, but when people talk about giving LM windows to get in his players to play his way, there is no universe in which we get in players of the cost of those with parachute payments. It’s a dead end, we will never out Southampton Southampton, given our budgets. We are more like to end up as Russell Martin’s Swansea. It seems to me, gut feel, that the teams that have broken the mold and had a real go with no parachute payments do not as a rule play this way. It’s more built around energy, physicality, athleticism. It is possible LM is starting to ‘get’ this. Let’s hope, and the summer window will give us an indication. The other aspect is even if played by great players, it can be somewhat dull. Played by average players it is mind numbingly tedious. It would be more interesting to see the analysis of the teams that have gone up over this period without parachute payments. Not sure the data above is saying much more than teams that go up generally create more chances and have most of the ball. It’s focussed on outcomes rather than different methods that lead to that. I also suspect in our case there is very little correlation between these stats and our results this season. Lots of managers fancy they could be Pep, if they only had his quality of players.

It is remarkable. Sign of a good team of course, but so many late late goals by them this season.