The Swan and Cemetery

If you genuinely think we were awful against Millwall, you’ve lost the plot.

It’s not a choice between “that was amazing” and “that was the worst performance in history”. It’s possible to see options in between.

And Vyner’s.

Dickie carded for his inability to disappear into thin air. Another afternoon with world class officials.

Pretty sure it still involved the skill of an opponent.

Yep, thought it was a pretty open game and didn’t think we were as awful as some are saying. Vyner good again, same with James. Birmingham look like they’ve got something going forward, but not particularly secure defensively.

It’s not allowed to be the skill of an opponent, it can only be our awfulness on the match day thread.

Time will tell, but just as I’ll be surprised if Middlesbrough finish bottom, I’ll be surprised if Ipswich finish top (or close to top). Not sure the comments were snide, they were reflective of where that regime left us?

Possibly Vyner/Dickie helped make them look powder puff?

Only 6 points from 1st to 24th this season, it’s incredibly tight.

And close to certain to come to fruition. Would be lucky to get 1/33 at the bookies.

I predict we end on 92 points, 23 wins, 23 draws, 46 goals for, 23 goals against.

Surely not? Need to ship him out with Yeboah (hasn’t taken his many chances) and James (legs have gone). TBH not many I’d keep as looking quite a lot like a team and that can’t be a good thing?

Vyner/Dickie looking like a very promising partnership, nice contrast.

Sure Zak won that. In fairness Stroud was at least 5 yards away, so difficult to spot.

Don’t think Pring was dropped for the Oxford game, NP rested a few.

Do you think Millwall supporters are spending half time chatting about how well/thrillingly their team have played in their utter dominance of boring BCFC?

Think he’s key against teams who set up this way, someone who can bring it out and play an ambitious pass.

Two teams better without the ball than with it so far. Not thrilling, but doubt Millwall supporters thinking “Blimey, we’re smashing it” any more than we are.

Also one of our best players last season, who didn’t have his best game against a very decent Championship side, when lots of others also below average. Roberts has no Championship experience and played very well against a poor League One team. Would be disappointed if NP saw that combination of factors as reason to drop Pring.

Yep, feels like a few years without a young/forward thinking/innovative/sycophant coach is about as much as SL can bear. Suspect one of the reasons we don’t hear much from PA is due to his full time job managing the relationship between NP and SL. Maybe correlation rather than cause and effect, but our success tends to come via stronger/reasonably traditional managers (eg JJ, GJ, SC) rather than up and coming ones (eg DMc, LJ)? Risk with stronger managers is they expect to be both accountable and empowered, whereas SL seems to like the idea that they should just be accountable!

Exactly. Reminds me of ‘from good to great’ a book doing the business consultancy psycho-babble rounds back in the day. Looked at US companies that had thrived over the long run and then identified traits they shared… made no attempt to identify other companies, with the same traits, that failed.

In fairness to Pring, he was playing against a much higher standard of opposition than Roberts has so far. We’ve yet to see if Roberts can do it at Championship level (albeit all the signs are very promising). Don’t think Pring deserves to be benched after one game, but great that there’s competition.

I’m all for getting a decent number of goal attempts in, but surely there must be times when he considers kicking the ball?

Lacklustre and far from great, but first game and some key creativity missing, plus PNE looked decent, particularly their pressing (to which we generally responded to poorly with inaccurate passing). But to read this thread without knowing the score, you’d assume we’d had a day out similar to Port Vale’s, rather than a point from a sub par performance.