The Journalist

I've always quite liked having flair players (in the David Noble sense of the word) or at least proper footballing players playing off one flank, as long as you've got someone comfortable going on the outside on the opposite side so you don't just become ridiculously narrow. Josh Brownhill, while obviously being very different to Noble, also had the intelligence to come inside from wide and influence the play. Jamie Paterson's another who was good at that IMO.

Sheff Utd L Preston W Crystal Palace W Crystal Palace W Hull L And, I'm not sure if you were at the Sheffield United one, but I vividly remember the match as one of the best performances I've ever seen from a City side in defeat. The players got a standing ovation from the entire away end post-game.

And five of those games David Noble started - the final five of the campaign - were actually off the right in a similar role to the one Josh Brownhill played during our cup run. Lee Johnson, as it happens, was left out for Nick Carle. That midfield of McIndoe - Carle - Elliott - Noble saw us end that season playing probably our best football of the entire campaign. I'm not sure Noble EVER started a game in the middle of midfield in the Championship. He just didn't have the mobility for it, so we had to find different areas of the field to hide his lack of athleticism.

I'd have thought with the power of hindsight he'd have just dived the right way for every penalty.

The next Jude Bellingham.

Another good performance from a team half made up of young’uns. Don’t mind it at all, don’t really care about the result. Next few months remains a bit of a free hit in terms of fine tuning and getting experience into players. While we’re still losing plenty, I think we’ve served up more entertainment in the past two/three months than the past two/three years put together.

The best thing I can say about Nigel is I have absolutely no doubt in my mind we'll be in a far better place when he leaves than when he joined. Whether that's pushing for promotion to the Premier League or not is obviously far from clear - but he'll have put the foundations in place for it at least.

It doesn’t help when he’s asked question after question after question when the journalist already knows what the answer will be. Nigel isn’t one for going through the motions so it just becomes utterly painful - and some fairly high-profile local journalists are pretty guilty of it. That said, one of the club media guys managed to get through a recent five-minute post-match interview without even asking a question. It was just a series of statements for Nigel to respond to. I’m the first to defend other journalists but of the current local ones now, outside Geoff Twentyman and James Piercy, the quality of interviewing is close to abysmal.

Interesting timing on the announcement if it was scheduled. Hope all is well, anyway.

Pros and cons then.

Also think Bentley instinctly tries to slow everything down (unless we’re chasing a goal in panic mode), whereas O’Leary’s default is to get us moving forward quickly. As I posted the other day - I do think Bentley is the better all-round goalkeeper but we play better front-foot football with O’Leary in the team. Maybe the captaincy hasn’t helped Dan and he feels like he ‘needs’ to be a calming influence.

Good job there’s not much on this - the most annoying kind of defeat.

Going to be good when we bring Bentley back and we’re left with two goalkeepers short of confidence and knowing the manager doesn’t trust them. Said it at the time but you HAVE to be sure what you’re doing when changing goalkeepers. It’s not a position you can just chop and change.

Still feels too early to judge this properly but my instinct is, at the moment at least, Bentley is the better goalkeeper - but we may just be a better team with O’Leary in it.

He’s always had that in him. Said it for ages. He hits a ball so cleanly off both sides - like nobody else we’ve had for a long while - he just needed to add a touch of composure and decision making on when to shoot.

He’s clearly benefitted from: - Having his game time properly managed - Having a physical presence with him to share the load - Having players run beyond him When those three things happen he’s a very, very good Championship player. Antoine Semenyo’s return makes a huge difference to Martin IMO.

£20m for a striker with a better than one-in-three record for Burnley in the Premier League? I'd say that was pretty decent business given the state of the league table.

Only watched the first half but thought he put tempo into our play rather than slowing/calming everything down, which Dan Bentley is very guilty of. My big question mark on Max is his physicality - can he dominate his box? He needs a run of games now so we get to find out.

I do hope the goalkeeper change has been properly thought through - if Max is in tonight he needs to stay in for at least half a dozen games, otherwise you end up in a situation where neither keeper feels trusted or confident. Lee Johnson got in an absolute pickle with his keepers towards the end.

As long as it can be unequivocally proven, I'd like to see points deducted for this sort of thing, personally.

I said this a few weeks ago - "by far" might be harsh as he's got some competition for it, but I think when you add the context that we had a look at him for six months and still decided he was worth the money despite him not showing much it was a remarkable signing. And fans reference that we'd just signed Szmodics too - Paterson was also here and is a considerably better player than the pair of them IMO.

You've never seen Palmer give any less than 100% on the pitch?! You've got to be absolutely kidding. The guy does far too much running for the crowd and not enough running for the team - for example, he'll hurtle towards a full-back clipping a ball down the line, throwing himself into an attempted block but getting nowhere near it, and then spend the next 30 seconds dusting himself off and meandering back into position. The fans give him a nice cheer because they see it as effort though.

They couldn’t have done it without us.

Overriding memory was the shock/elation of the winner and the immediate realisation I needed to bottle that feeling up and begin a complete rewrite. That match report was read by 3.2 million people. City were probably the biggest sports story in the world that night.

In terms of financial outlay and what he’s actually produced on the pitch - and set against the context of what he did during his loan spell (ie exactly what he’s done since signing permanently) - I’m struggling to think of many worse signings in the club’s history.