Supersonic Robin

Conway is miles ahead of Bell.

If we simply had the choice to keep one, I'd pick Conway without a moment's hesitation.

Unfortunately, we don't have full control in the current situation. It doesn't seem that Conway is particularly likely to stay.

Just now, Lew-T said:

Ha! It’s funny what a bit of TV coverage and eyes on the game can do. Don’t see this against the likes of Millwall or Preston.

Don't think it's anything to do with being on TV. 

We're better suited to playing against teams who want to attack us and want to have a lot of the ball.

3 minutes ago, T R said:

Why the hell is mehmeti still playing. Is he Manning's lover boy?

24 minutes ago, aa_bcfc said:

Imagine if the Lansdowns took your advise and just packed their bags and said that’s us we’re off. WTF would we do then? Are we all going chip in to pay the £20 or £30 million debt every year?

16 minutes ago, aa_bcfc said:

It might be on the market but they are not exactly queuing around the block to buy it. 
Perhaps you’d happy to have ownership like the sags have got, I’d rather have the Lansdowns. 

6 minutes ago, aa_bcfc said:

Without the Lansdowns we’d probably be in league 1 playing in a ramshackle Ashton Gate. 

As a fanbase, we really need to get away from this view that Bristol City Football Club can't exist without the Lansdowns.

Every other club in the country seems to manage without the Lansdowns. In fact, the vast majority of clubs of our size have done a hell of a lot better. 

17 minutes ago, Davefevs said:

And now you know the kind of reason why Phil Alexander couldn’t do what he was brought in to do.

Fever Pitch is Jon’s “train set”, all safely bubble-wrapped by Bristol Sport.

I am starting to get really sickened by “them”!

This has been my feeling for a while.

As far as I can see, Jon basically just uses the club as an outlet for his various creative endeavours.

That would be bad enough as it is. What makes it worse is the fact that we now don't even bother appointing anyone who might have an interest in actually running a football club (i.e. A CEO) to sit alongside him and do the grown-up work whilst he plays with his crayons.

5 minutes ago, AshtonGreat said:

Like what? Pearson is treated like a god on here 

This.....

12 minutes ago, Davefevs said:

Think there were plenty of derogatory comments over his tenure.  I won’t bring up one accusation that came up several times.

Robot / Boring is no different to Dinosaur is it?

Lots of comments referring to his age - old, dinosaur, etc etc

I also recall him being accused of being "boring", "grumpy" and "a bully".

Unfortunately, we even had a few unsympathetic comments regarding his health, not to mention the bizarre accusation which Dave has alluded to.

12 minutes ago, AshtonGreat said:

I think it's very toxic on here. I've lost count of the threads slagging Manning off - and many of the comments have been personal

I actually think the vast majority of the criticism Manning's received has been focused purely on his competency as a football manager. Granted, there's been a bit more content than necessary about him coming across as "boring", which IMHO isn't a particularly important critereon on which to assess him.

It's nowhere near as bad as some of the personal insults thrown at LJ and Pearson though

I'm as big of an Andi fan as you'll find - one of my favourite City players and massively underrated IMO.

However, this does seem a bit of a dodgy tweet, I can see why some of our fans are a bit put out by it.

Technically, Andi is still a Bristol City player. Granted, he's on loan at WBA, but celebrating a win against your primary employer and expressing your disappointment at not being involved in making it happen seems rather unnecessary. It was probably a day where the best course of action would have been to say nothing.

In Andi's defence, it's probably just ill thought out rather than malicious. It seems he has severed any connection to us in his mind.

In fairness, I don't mind the Mebude signing.

A young player with a good CV in youth football, who we brought in to have a look at. If it doesn't work out, we simply don't activate the option to buy and cut our (very small) losses. If it does work out, we may have unearthed an absolute gem to sign on a permenant at a discount price. I can at least see the logic behind the decision to bring him in on loan.

Granted, it doesn't seem to be working out for him here, but it was a low-risk high-reward punt. 

I think the Twine signing seemed much less sensibile. We knew we were going nowhere this season. We knew we almost certainly won't be able to sign him on a permenant this summer. So why waste the money on bringing him in for a few months?

3 minutes ago, AshtonGreat said:

i don't think there can be too many fingers pointed at Manning today. WBA are and always have been a bigger club, and they have a better squad of players. We played OK

The only reason why clubs like WBA are considered any "bigger" is because we've spent decades being held back by thinking like this

7 minutes ago, Spike said:

This stream I'm watching he keeps calling Mehmeti "met-metti"... really irritating

They're quite a strange commentary duo in general, aren't they?

It's an incredibly strange choice of image.

7 people in the photo, only one of which is a current first team player. Is it normal to have a big picture of the club's technical director on such a post?

Surely the club know that Tinnion and Manning are relatively unpopular figures within the fanbase right now, so why make them so prominent in the advert? We seem to have used this as an opportunity to double-down on a couple of unpopular appointments.

Very odd.

And when it happens, a few of us may suggest that our 2054 "We beat Southampton" kit is a little bit tinpot.

No doubt we'll be told by some fellow fans that beating Southampton is a brilliant achievement for a club like us, and that it's unrealistic for us to expect to emulate the success of clubs like Peterborough, Oxford, and Plymouth who all spent the majority of the 2040's playing in the Premier League.

3 minutes ago, BigTone said:

Ok, a win is a win and the points hopefully secure our Championship status. There are, however, 3 changes that need to be made before next season. The following need to be moved on and replaced IMO:

Mehmeti

Cornick

Manning

 

 

Mehmeti's individual excellence created the goal for us today.

He was also our most dangerous player vs Ipswich.

And was arguably our most influential attacker in the Southampton win too.

I gather that a few seem to have it in for him on here, but Mehmeti is currently at the top of the pecking order among our wingers (probably joined by Sykes). He's far from our biggest issue, as much as it may pain some of our fans to admit it.

Manning beats a team in the bottom half of the table at his 11th attempt!

P11 W1 D3 L7

2 minutes ago, Roe said:

With the work to make space for the goal yes but it's only Sykes that's caused a problem from open play allowing for there to be a threat

Mehmeti also received the ball on the half way line, beat two players, and put in a brilliant cross that forced the Swansea defender to put it behind for a corner.

We then scored from that corner.

Just now, Roe said:

Sykes the only player to actually make any difference to our attack

Mehmeti made that goal in fairness

Brilliant play from Mehmeti.

1 hour ago, TDarwall said:

Things tend to change very slowly at the bottom, by this stage of the season, teams are there for a reason.

If you're battling for the top 6 every time you don't won its points lost  at the bottom if you don't lose its points won.

Exactly this.

It sounds incredibly obvious, but people often seem to forget that the teams at the bottom of the table don't/won't win many matches.

14 minutes ago, Tim Monaghan said:

Sorry, I forgot about the terrible team that Pearson inherited that included Scott, Semenyo, Wiemann, Kalas, Palmer, DaSilva, Bentley, Wells. 

I get that he ran some contracts down, but he still had one of the best squads we've had in YEARS scrapping a midtable finish and a 17th place. If that's success, then I'm out. Do you think the squad he inherited vs the team now was worse? Anyway, I'm not having this Pearson argument again.  

But, lets say he was a success then! 

Regardless of your view of individual players, there's no doubt that Pearson inherited the worst performing team in the league.

By far the worst numbers in the league going forward, and only Wycombe anywhere near as bad as us defensively.

xG table at the end of the 2020/21 season below:

2 hours ago, ChippenhamRed said:

This is what we’re reduced to now. We’ve lost our fourth game in a row to a club who’ve just spent four years in League One, but it’s OK because “we gave it a go”. So what if it felt different. It felt different against Southampton and we’ve lost every game since then. I have zero faith in Manning now, and even less faith in the people that put him there.

Meanwhile Ipswich join the long list of clubs that emerge from the depths of lower league football and pass us on the way up.

Sick of this club.

I was planning to write something similar, but don't think I could've put it better myself.

Today was undoubtedly an improved performance, but ultimately it's a 4th consecutive defeat for us.

There have been a fair few posts on the forum tonight along the lines of - "Ipswich are quality, we gave it a go. What more could we want?"

Granted, Ipswich are flying at the moment, but we were 2-1 up with 15 minutes to play against a team in the same division as us. How can we come away with 0 points from that position and simply be happy that we gave them a decent game?

Do we really have that little self respect? That little self belief? That little ambition?

If we come away from a night like tonight feeling positive, what does that say about where we are as a club? And what does that say about who we are as a club?

Nice to see things work out a bit better for him today. For much of the game he was the most dangerous player on the pitch.

I thought the goal was a great example of his strengths - positive and aggressive running at defenders, small quick touches to beat players, and a decent effort on goal (admittedly helped by a deflection, but those kinds of positive actions earn a bit of luck). I don't think anyone else in our team scores that goal.

A good demonstration of the potential he has. Now it's just about extracting it a bit more consistently. 

16 minutes ago, Andy082005 said:

It was absolutely the right time to move Pearson on 

They just got his replacement absolutely wrong 

For me, the frustrating thing about moving Pearson on when we did is that it will always be a "what if?"

Had we given him funds in the summer and this season to do something with it, then by now we might have a clearer idea of whether Pearson could have taken us on further, or whether we'd reached our ceiling under him.

Alas, we'll never know.

I'll add my usual update on Manning's games vs teams in the bottom half*

P10: W0, D3, L7

3 points from 30 against the worst sides in the league. This is what's killing us.

*at the time we played them.

2 minutes ago, petehinton said:

I don’t care who you are and who you’re against, you don’t go 2-1 up in a game on 77 minutes and lose it

Good point.

Granted they're a better side than us, but it's Ipswich, not Real Madrid. 

As good as they've been in the last 20 minutes, it's got to be seen as a bit of a collapse from our point of view.