Ron W

First half would agree, although he was still solid. Second half he improved - along with Tanner, who looked like a rabbit in the headlights before HT and was one of our best outlets after the break.

Why does it have to be totally black and white? There's far too much nuance in 20 years of ownership. Lansdown can both have not led us to success without being chased out of town. Completely agree with most of what @KegCity wrote too, but it then wades into the binary debate. He's not been terrible, and his footballing judgement has often been poor. He's wasted a lot of (his own, not our) money. We could have had better owners, we could've had worse.

I think judging by the rest of your post you've misread what I wrote.

Mike Ashley was a terrible owner, but probably did a good job by his financial advisor's reckoning. And probably made a very healthy profit? Where do you want to start... Randy Lerner, Ellis Short, Mel Morris, there's three for starters. At least SL hasn't turned off the tap the moment he's realised how much is going down the plughole and left us to rot. He's made a significant number of poor investments though.

He wouldn't be the first successful businessman to burn a chunk of his earnings running a football club without much to show for it. And he wouldn't be the last.

Yeah, bi-weekly on slow weeks, but the thread is the thread. The biggest sadness is that when he did try to seriously entrust someone else with running the club, it was Mark Ashton.

It's not right and I'm not excusing it, but there's very few clubs where things couldn't get toxic enough for the same thing to happen.

When the 'so-called fans' are being called out you know you're not far from the sack...

Yeah no one could really argue that. But is he a "pox" on our club for ploughing millions into BCFC, making us better in the process but wasting tonnes of his own money that he'll never get back? Bit 'arsh.

We can point to the success stories of Bournemouth and others and they have gone way past us despite having a far smaller catchment area. But have we done better or worse than you would expect from a team who've spent a good proportion of their existence as a third-tier backwater? Since 2007 we've spent 13 of the last 15 seasons in the Championship, and we've finished in the top half in six. Nothing special, but we also won our first league trophy in 60 years in the two seasons we were in League One which says a lot about how little success we have ever had. When SL leaves City, will we be in a worse or better position than when he found us? You'd have to be very harsh to say a revamped stadium, new training ground and sustained second-tier set-up isn't progress, even if it could be better.

Nigel has been, for the most part, very wise in the way he deals with the media and the fans. It's a big part of the job in 2022 and he's been pretty good at it. When he talked about being on the bus or off it in the past, he was early enough in his City career, with enough green shoots of optimism that it brought us along with him. He has come across as humble, accepting of his own failings, calculated in how he assesses the limitations of the club. I've not met him but people who have seem to have found him approachable, welcoming and charming. I don't mean to be too cynical, but he's not stupid. He's been in this game a long time and knows if he can distinguish himself from the managers who can avoid sounding like they blame everyone else apart than themselves, he's won some of the battle. In the same way he knows exactly how and when to push the button on the state of refereeing and get national coverage. Nigel's had plenty of run-ins with the media (and fans) before and made plenty of brash statements. Look at the final months of his Leicester career. But watching his interviews here, he's looked more mellow for the most part. I say this very much from the outside, I haven't seen a City game in person since Millwall away last season, but I get the feeling the sentiment has changed from both sides. The atmosphere at AG sounded like it had turned today. Nigel burned a few bridges with the way he talked about Atkinson last week, and now the line about getting booed out of bigger clubs isn't endearing himself to anyone. In the club interview, you can hear him getting half way through criticising the fans and then thinking better of it. "Maybe it might be a good thing for us to play away. We didn't quite get the... It was a game where we needed the fans to get behind us, and they did for the mostpart, but their frustrations are very obvious too, so... We've just got to get back to being as solid as we can." For a straight-talking manager, that's a lot of insinuation without actually wanting to go the distance and say what he means. His biggest problem is he's already said too much to backtrack, when his stock is already as low as it has been since he took the job. As I said, I don't know enough about what it's like to watch City at the moment to speculate but it's certainly the sort of language we've heard from City bosses in the past who didn't have long left. Similar to GJ at Watford and Reading in his final days.

At a guess, worse than that.

I wouldn't call him very open. He tells Ali he's not asking the right question, then when he asks directly why Atkinson isn't in the squad, gives what to me comes across as quite a smart Alec retort, which beyond stating the bleeding obvious certainly isn't insightful. "Why's Rob Atkinson not in the squad?" "Because other players are ahead of him. Simple as that. There you go." Even when pressed further, he will only mention trust, and then talk indirectly about players not being selected rather than Atkinson in particular. If he genuinely had any intention of answering the question he'd tried to cajole Ali into asking, he definitely would've done it with those two answers.

Exactly this. It sounds a lot easier than it is. Ali has done stints on 5 Live, he's a very good journalist. Why does he go softly-softly on the King question? Because it's after a defeat and Pearson can be volatile. Why doesn't he then push it? Because Pearson clearly doesn't want to go into more detail than "it's about trust". I don't think Nigel's made Ali look bad with his attitude though.

Wow, that's far more than I was expecting when I saw the award win.

They're not though, are they.

There has been a concerted effort not to stop games for every medical incident this season but sounds like a common sense vacuum on this one. If in doubt, why wouldn't the officials play it safe!?

It’s relevant to anyone who wants to find out what’s put a massive dent in Sunderland’s season, I suppose. Which begs the question, what are you doing here?

Someone’s either brilliant or awful. Maybe he wasn’t great for us, didn’t especially want to be here (and he definitely didn’t), and is now playing well after persistence all round?

The amount of strikers you see called out at the top level for not getting across their man - whatever level the boy goes onto play at regularly, he's got a brilliant instinct for a 20-year-old.

Wasn't sure of the exact arrangement of the partnership between SGS and City which brought AS to the club but reading this press release, it is directly linked to the academy from our side. So no academy, no Semenyo. Re: Morrell, we brought him through the academy, his success internationally is something for our young kids to look up to, we sold him for a fee to another Championship club. I'm struggling to see the negatives here?

This was an interesting question and reminded me about the Training Ground Guru Academy Productivity Rankings. For the latest round of rankings, we're 32nd out of the 92 EFL/PL clubs, so bang in mid-table for the Championship, and rank eighth out of 19 Category 2 academies. For an area of the country without a great history of bringing through too much top-class talent and without the prestige of some of the clubs ahead of us, that's perfectly fine going.

This feels like it’s taking quite a negative view over everything which is open for debate. Semenyo joined from SGS because of their partnership with the club - would we have had that same structure without our academy? Likewise Scott. Would SL’s close links with Guernsey have brought him in at his age if we had a B Team and nothing else? Maybe, but maybe not. Having a well-respected academy certainly didn’t hurt either signing. Regardless, the facts are that we’ve made >£30m on academy products in the last few years and have enough around the first-team squad/on loan at National League or higher to suggest it’s been doing a very good job for a little while imo.

You might also say it’s odd to turn an assist for a winning goal into a criticism of a player’s ability.

Perhaps what NP said was meant as a kick up the arse and maybe it was the right thing to say, but to answer your question you don't have to be a Premier League manager to know what gets said in public and private is very different. Whether Britton means this quote to come across like he's not happy ending up playing for Cork City or not I don't know, but it could've been worded better... "I scored and got taken off and then was told 'you're not going on loan, you're staying here because we want you to get fit' - it was disappointing because I would have liked to have gone out on loan in League Two to prove myself and I probably wouldn't be in the situation that I'm in now."