LondonBristolian

Pearson is getting a fair bit more right than wrong but the four striker thing really bugs me. Even in the last ten minutes when you are desperately chasing a goal, it rarely succeeds, and certainly not when you do it as early as we do. I honestly think that, at any point of the game, a clear organised structure where you have players in positions to move the ball forward is a much better tactic than piling on every available centre forward.

Starting to see why it is not your favourite chant.

Not sure that would fit the tune...

At least we know who to blame if we suddenly start firing a load of shots over the crossbar…

I agree - bar maybe Walker for Dier - but think Southgate will come under a lot of pressure to justify it if there is another poor performance tonight.

I'm a big fan of Conway but I think it's probably in his interests to stick with Scotland. He's got the makings of a very good Championship striker and might well be a Premier League player in the future but - much as I'd love him to prove me wrong - I don't think he's ever quite going to be "best 3 or 4 English out and out strikers of the moment" good, and that's where he'd need to be to be in the England squad. We saw how good Abraham was and he's not quite cemented a place in the squad. If he commits to Scotland, Conway has a good chance of a solid International career.

You're making some valid reasons why certain players shouldn't start but the fact there is one game before the World Cup and Southgate hasn't really experimented with alternatives makes me skeptical of your idea that he's suddenly going to chuck out the line up and start again. I reckon Southgte went into last night's game with 6 players in mind as definite starters (Walker, Maguire, James, Rice, Kane and Sterling) and two more (Bellingham and Foden) in a tight race with one or two players for a starting spot. The major question is what Southgate does now. One more game before the tournament and he has to decide whether to a) stick with the tried and tested team from 2021 and hope their form returns at the key moment b) tweak the formation and hope that makes a difference c) rip up the plans and start from scratch with untested players None are great options. @Taylor10hits the nail on the head with the issue with Maguire in particular. He is seen as a lynchpin of the defence due to his tournament performances in 2018 and 2021 but has done nothing for club or country in the last year to justify the confidence shown in him. There are no tried and tested alternatives but, if Southgate sticks with him and he has a bad tournament, it looks like a terrible decision.

I had the same thing with my Subbuteo as I had with my model trainset where I loved the idea of it and loved excitedly setting it up with my Dad on the dining table but it always seemed to take so long to set up that I was always losing interest by the time we started to actually play!

I'd still pick Weimann over Semenyo but I was thinking as I read the thread that, on current form alone, Andi is probably the most droppable of the three forwards. I'm not arguing in favour of doing so but I do think it is a remarkable turnaround that we started the season worried about the absence of Semenyo, feeling pretty much reliant on Weimann and with Martin a shoe-in for the first team and a month later Wells and Conway look more vital than Weimann, Semenyo can't get in the starting line-up and Martin is down to fifth choice. It's a great position to be in.

Squires never disappoints.

Exactly this. I'd totally understand things being cancelled yesterday and today but I don't feel it at all disrespectful to go ahead with a game of football. I've also seen the Last Night of the Proms has been cancelled. To me, that feels even more appropriate to go ahead with it in the circumstances.

I think - whatever you think a hereditary monarchy - it would be absurd to have a hereditary monarchy and then arbitrarily change how it works just because the next person in line isn't particularly popular. The line of succession is clear and, under it, Charles should be next.

I suppose the other question for Potter is how far he feels he can take Brighton and at what point he has "finished what he is building". If you look at Rodgers at Leicester, for example, it seems like he probably reached a peak point with Leicester, stayed too long and is on a downward trajectory. Potter is in his fourth season at Brighton and will ultimately need to judge a point where he has reached the peak of what he can achieve and where he is unlikely to achieve any more by staying than damaging his reputation. Arguably Howe (at Bournemouth), Wilder (at Sheff Utd) and Dyche (at Burnley) missed the point where they could walk away with the maximum credibility and only Howe has recovered from that so far career-wise. Potter could might feel he can get Brighton into Europe and winning the Conference or Europa League or might feel he is at the peak of what he can get from the available resources. Certainly he'd realistically face a major challenge turning them into a consistent top four or five side given the budgets he is competing against.

I do think part of it is psychological and - in that regard - I think it important that we held on yesterday as that will give us a boost. At the same time, the subs I was unconvinced by were Williams for Wells and Massengo for Scott. Nothing against either player that came on but I felt we may have sacrificed an attacking focal point and gave them momentum whereas keeping three attacking players would have meant they would have had to guard against the counter rather than committing players forward. I realise many will disagree - and of course NP knows a billion times more than I or anyone posting on here does about football tactics - but I am not a fan of sitting on leads as I think it invites pressure and is often counter-productive. I think we would throw away leads less if we tried to keep the opposition on the back foot.

It isn’t so much about the tech than how it is applied. VAR can be really useful if it is used exclusively for clear and obvious errors but becomes a problem when it becomes one ref’s subjective interpretation over another’s. I honestly think it would simplify and speed things up if, for any decision, a panel of three VAR officials could watch it a maximum of three times and - if they aren’t unanimous agreement after three views - the original decision stands as it cannot by definition be a clear or obvious error.

Yeah - I didn’t mean so much the results but more that we compete in the games and don’t get comprehensively outplayed.

I'm enjoying this a lot but think we will know a lot about where we are when we get into the International break. As it stands, I think there's every reason to feel we can finish in the top half of the table but the three games coming up will give us a sense of whether we can do more than that. Under LJ, we flattered to deceive but could easily slip up in a home game against a battling low-scoring team trying to turn around a run of poor form - which is exactly what we get in Preston - and tended to get walloped away from home against the promotion favourites (which we get in Burnley and Norwich). If we can do a professional job against Preston and compete in both the Burnley and Norwich games, I'll be starting to get very excited...

I for one am relieved that the fact we're winning games isn't deterring our fans from sharing utterly absurd takes on this forum.

What excites me is how comfortable all ten outfield players are on the ball. I have not seen our centre-backs go off on mazy dribbles as much since our promotion season under Cotts!

Not seen it yet but imagined it must. I was massively confused in the stadium as the whistle had definitely gone pre-Naismith so as soon as it became clear a goal had been given, the only logical explanation was it had been awarded to Wells.

Bit late to the thread but it has to have been a Wells goal. The whistle went before Naismith put it in the net.

On my way back to Blackburn station, a Blackburn fan spotted my shirt and amiably wandered over to tell me we were brilliant, passed superbly and throughly deserved the win. That was nice.

My guess would also be that that is the only change from midweek.

This weekend I am in Stockport. The reasoning being I have friends in Manchester, it is a base I can get to Blackburn from and there were a few places I could use h g Art Pass I was given for my birthday. I have been joking all week about how ridiculously unglamorous my destination is but, having got here, it a surprisingly nice place with a really great park, a couple of interesting Tudor buildings to explore and some air raid shelters I am off to see tomorrow. All in all, it is well worth a weekend away. But it made me wonder if it was worth having thread of tourist recommendations for surprisingly good British towns to visit. Any recommendations?

I think the major difference is that the women/girls involved didn’t have a voice, or at least not unless they said “the right things”. The music press wrote approvingly and extensively about bands likeLed Zeppelin and their teenage groupies and there were a few “superstar groupies” - some underage - who were interviewed about their exploits because it fed into the rock star Mythos but the music press of the time was focused on selling to teenage boys a dream of being a rock star and then being able to have sex wherever you wanted, whenever you wanted with whoever you wanted. There was no space for stories of women who did not like how they had been treated because the feelings of those women were pretty much irrelevant. Social media means that a woman who believes she has been raped or sexually assaulted has a space where they can say “this happened to me and this is how it affected me” and people actually hear the experiences from the other side, which is makes it far more uncomfortable to ignore.