Dr Balls

Only just seen this thread. Don’t know if anyone else has recommended it but absolutely love Muino on Cotham Hill. Bravas further down gets all the Tapas plaudits, and Pasta Loco is also nearby and well known, but the small tapas tasting plates in Muino are great and not too expensive. Table of 7 of us basically ate our way through the whole menu! And a couple of weeks ago took the wife to Adelina Yard in Welsh Bsck for our anniversary. I hadn’t realised how few tables it has. Tasting menu expensive but exceptional, so somewhere to consider for a real occasion. Didn’t try the wine flight that went with the tasting menu as the wife’s given up alcohol, but it also seemed popular.

The problem is that as long as Dortmund keep selling their best players (especially to Bayern) then they aren’t going to win anything. Would they have won today with Haaland? Course they would have done. And now they will sell Bellingham as well. And so Munich will win the Bundesliga again next year. There’s a moral there somewhere for us…

Can add Northampton to that list. Brentford were another that had been far longer than us, but not any more. What about Preston? 62 years and counting.

The problem for Burnley is that their possession style football was great at Championship level as they clearly had better players. Back in the Premier League, it’s doubtful that they will be able to do the same against most of the teams at that level. As for Forest and Steve Cooper, it’s their home form that has kept them up. Away from home their results have been really poor. Clearly they have got some good younger players (Johnson, Gibbs-White) but will need yet more recruitment to do it all again next year.

Add Paul Lake to the list of centre backs whose careers ended far too early due to injuries. He really was supposed to be the next great thing in the mid to late 80s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lake

Remember Coventry were relegated in 2011-12 after we beat them at Ashton Gate under MacInnes at Easter, with goals from Stead and Bolasie. We went down the following season under S’OD but took only 2 seasons to bounce back. We then ditched Cotterill for Johnson and Ashton and flattered to deceive for a couple of seasons with Tammy Abraham and then the League Cup run, but after that it was a case of going backwards. Only in the last 2 seasons under Nige have we actually seen progress in the club and team. Coventry had to hit rock bottom in League 2, the owners at odds with the owners of the stadium, playing home games at Birmingham and Northampton, but their stroke of good fortune was bringing back Mark Robins as manager and sticking with him. As for being overtaken by other clubs coming up from a lower division, I am sure fans of many other established second tier clubs felt similarly aggrieved when we made the 2007-8 playoff final.

Only around February, if they have any sense. But hopefully not, because he would likely keep them up, just as he did Huddersfield this season!

Big changes in BBC “local” radio, i.e. it’s not going to be local anymore past 2pm weekdays or on weekends. Regional at best. So how that works with local sport I have no idea. All part of shifting resources from radio to digital apparently, but really just about saving money, even though local radio is “cheap as chips” compared to pretty much everything else they produce.

To be fair to Robins, I don’t think anyone on here would have picked them as playoff contenders at the beginning of the season, or even 10 games in. What he has done is improve Coventry every year, despite all the challenges, and been given a bit of time to do it as they moved from League 2 to the brink of the Premiership. Nige is 2 years into sorting out our club, and other than the wobble around Christmas, we were never really in relegation troubles. He has cleared out a lot of high wage players, brought through a lot of youngsters, and put us back on a much more even keel than the shambles he inherited from Holden, Johnson and Ashton. One was out of his depth, while the less said about the other two the better. We now play a brand of football than is more exciting than the terminally boring last few years of Johnson and the truly dire under Holden.

But then they have had a stellar season and it’s probably easier to get bigger away allocations at many League One grounds, where the home club will be keen to maximise income from more away fans, than it is in the Championship.

Was the 209 at Huddersfield on a midweek night cold enough to freeze off your extremities and few other things besides? Sorry to be the statistical pedant but the problem with this is that mean (average) is a really poor statistical measure for this type of distribution of data. Far better would be a median with ranges for both the crowd size and the distances. Our only sub 50 mile trip is Cardiff, and at push only Swansea, Reading, West Brom, Birmingham and Coventry are less than 100 miles. The same issue affects Cardiff to a similar degree and Swansea even more.

Without Reading’s 6 point deduction, Cardiff would have gone down on 49 points so only 10 points either way between relegation zone and playoffs, which really shows how tight this division is. Small margins can make a huge difference. As for Sheffield United, a decent team with parachute payments, but agree with @spudskithat everything seemed to fall their way this season in the league. And certainly in our 2 games against them!

And with the BBC trying to kill local radio, it’s hardly surprising when so many people say they get their “news” through social media. It’s like going back 200+ years when “news” was akin to gossip heard at the local water pump, with the occasional official notice pinned to a wall somewhere!

@Davefevs Can always count on you to have all the stats! So 12th = to be exact for both goals scored and conceded… Although I have spotted an inconsistency that I don’t quite understand. In the “shots for” sheet it says we only scored 52 goals rather than 55 in the “goals sheet”. Similar disparity for goals and shots conceded. And we are not the only ones affected. How come? Own goals taken out?

Just checked the end of season table: Goals scored 12th Goals conceded 12th In simple terms, we just need to score more and concede less!

Only bad home games. Quite a few frustrating home ones e.g. Sunderland, Millwall, Blackpool, Reading; unlucky home ones e.g. Sheffield United; and a couple where we were just outplayed e.g. QPR and Burnley, both of which were top of the table at the time.

If you want to find out what’s going on in Bristol, particularly in terms of decisions made by Marvin and City Hall, it’s really hard. And then when you do occasionally get a local journalist asking difficult questions they try to ban them!

To ensure making the playoffs a club should be aiming for 75 points, which is about 1.6 points per game. Win 20+ games in a season and you should make it, unless of course you are Blackburn and lose most of the rest! Coventry and Sunderland only won 18 games each this season (that’s under 40% of all games played). So for us winning 20 games would mean winning an additional 5 games next season compared to this. Is that possible? I really don’t see why not.

Have already had to put in requests for my rota up to Christmas. Best guess is we start at home on 5th August with a Carabao Cup 1st round tie midweek. The following weekend is the balloon fiesta, so we will be away, plus had to factor in all the international breaks, first of which is in early September.

10th-13th August.

Overall an improvement on last season, but also a missed opportunity as the chances of making the playoffs with just 69 points is not likely to happen again next season. We have been unlucky with injuries, particularly defensively. Missing Kalas for pretty much the whole season went we were defensively weaker, plus the injuries to Naismith and Atkinson were disruptive. However Vyner performed far better than expected, although he needs someone stronger, ideally taller and definitely more willing and able to bring the ball out of defence next to him. We also sold Bentley without it really making us weaker at goalkeeper, but I remain unsure if Max is the long term answer. Is he good enough to get into the Top 6? Of the full backs/wing backs, Pring has been the star. Strong, fast, committed, great at crossing and generally good coming forward. Dasilva has also always been consistent even when targeted by oppositions, who have found him far harder to get past than they might have presumed. Will he stay? Probably not, given the drop in wages in any new contract. On the right Tanner has generally been ok, but at times looks weak and offers a lot less going forward. Kane Wilson has been AWOL most of the season, while Sykes has looked good at RWB. Scott has obviously been the star in midfield, and will be difficult to replace. As for James, he is Mr Consistency and what he does is more evident when he’s not in the team. The problem we have from midfield is the lack of goals. That definitely needs improving next season. Up front, without last season’s WSM combination, it’s really been about the emergence of Conway and to a lesser extent Bell. The former is exceptional at this level and I agree we need to hold onto him and keep him free from injury. If we do, he will easily get 20+ league goals next season. Selling Semenyo definitely helped the finances, and didn’t obviously weaken us. Less sure about letting Chris Martin go when he did. It was less about the goals with him but more about holding the ball upfront and at times we lacked anyone to do that. Also Sam Bell needs to go to the gym over the summer and bulk up a little bit. Too often he was bullied off the ball like an 8 year old playing against the senior boys. As for Wells and Weimann, both have their good points but I am not sure how the combination up front would work, especially with Mehmeti as well. Overall, I am optimistic for next season. Nige and team are doing ok given the financial situation at the club, but it could have been so much more. The fact that only Burnley and Sheffield United did the double over us (the latter having been outplayed for significant periods of both games) plus we were unbeaten at home in 2023 until the last game, suggests that we have improved, but conceding late goals has remained a weakness, and there were too many draws that should have been wins. If we could get some better refereeing decisions as well that would help. Prediction for next season? Top 10, with a realistic chance of playoffs, if the luck goes our way, but we will need 70+ points.

23 seems a bit old for Dortmund, certainly for a “rising star”. Bellingham was truly precocious at 16, while at 19, Scott is the perfect age for them to improve a young player and then move on for an enormous fee 3-4 years later, as per Haaland.

Agree with those who said he saved his worst performance for his last home game for us. The pressure on him has been immense, not necessarily helped by some of the things the club has done, he’s not been at his best following his recent return from injury and then he’s up against the best team in the division, so in a way it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. That said the “assist” for their winner was still an absolute shocker and Nige did the right thing in taking him off. He then had a long tête-à-tête with him on the sidelines, which looked like good man-management on Nige’s part. I take @Davefevs‘s point that in the first 20 minutes he was part of a reasonably effective press up front, along with Conway, Bell and Cornick, but in terms of actually having any possession in midfield we were sadly lacking which meant Scott was anonymous for large periods of the game. If he was also worried about getting injured again then that may also have affected whether or not he went in for a 50:50 challenge. Looking ahead for Scott, even if he stayed at Championship level, and even more so assuming he goes to the Premier League this summer, the real challenge has to be more “end product”. His number of goals and assists this season is actually remarkably low for a supposedly attacking midfielder. That has to change. His “hero” is Jack Grealish and I would suggest that the similarities go beyond the way he wears his socks. Grealish had all the skills and talent but it’s only since his move to Manchester City that he has really added a significant number of goals. So in part it may be the player maturing but also the role he is being asked to play in a system that suits him. That is very likely going to be the case for Scott as well. I wish Scott good luck going forward with his career and that includes having a much better performance for us against QPR, assuming Nige even picks him. Perhaps with the pressure off a bit he can just play and enjoy himself.

Sounds like our former Chief Executive Officer is keeping up the good work following his move to the ECB by actively looking to ditch the Hundred, that awful chimera of a format that literally no one plays other than the teams in that competition, and instead revert to 18 teams (i.e. the counties but maybe renamed after their city locations) playing T20 like everyone else. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/apr/28/strauss-exits-ecb-with-new-t20-format-on-table-and-hundred-on-the-rack

What we don’t seem to get are the ridiculously soft penalties that do get awarded against us. Saturday’s penalty for Rotherham was a prime example as Hugill flung himself to the ground under no appreciable contact. Ours are only awarded if a player is rugby tackled in the penalty area but even that isn’t a given…