The fact it was at home makes it so much worse. You see teams get spanked like this away from home every so often, but it's very rare to see a team get mauled like that on their own patch. Especially when they are supposedly a mid-table side.

"We're still only two points off the playoffs - or so I'm told, I don't look at the league table. We'll dust ourselves off and go again on Saturday. To be honest you can pin the entire blame for that defeat on Joe, after his mistake at the beginning there was no coming back. Not very good, is he?"

+7 GD becomes 0. Down to 12th. We all know Mowbray is useless, but his inability to react to going a man tonight made it painfully clear how out of his depth he is. The worst thing about this defeat? It changes nothing. He'll be in the dugout on Saturday like nothing happened.

Absolutely shameful. The manager, the players, the lot of them.

WE WANT EIGHT

Yep. The only surprise is that it's taken this long for a team to smash us like this. Speaks volumes about the division in general.

But I thought clubs like us and Preston couldn't possibly compete with the likes of Bournemouth and Fulham ? They're away from home as well.

WE WANT SEVEN

WE WANT SIX

I imagine Fulham are likely to finish in the top two this season, and in the past three seasons we haven't registered a single victory against a team who finished first or second. In fact we've only managed 2 points from 36 (2 draws, 10 defeats). As soon as we play one of the division's few good teams we are brutally exposed as the average Championship cloggers we've always been under Mowbray. I suppose my only point is that this shouldn't be a surprise at all. To coin one of Mercer's phrases, putting money on a Fulham victory tonight was a license to print money.

If they were mid-table it would be a much easier sell. The fact they are in the relegation zone and haven't won a single game so far this season makes it a pretty huge risk for any manager with a decent reputation, massive salary or not. Most managers of a high calibre will already have more money than they know what to do with anyway. If Emery and Howe were the two managers Newcastle had narrowed it down to, what exactly is the strategy? Two totally different managers with very few commonalities. I'd love to know what the criteria was to end up with those two as the final options.

Conte is a good appointment for Spurs, should shore them up and may help motivate some of their better players. If appointed Emery is better than I expected Newcastle to be able to get in their position, but I think their survival will depend on how wisely they spend in January.

Think Norwich might be on course to surpass Derby as worst ever PL team. Derby managed 11 points, and Norwich have only managed 2 from a possible 30 so far. Keeping in mind that Norwich are, I think, already 6th worst in history from the 19/20 season.

As I said, should have sold him in the summer. He just isn't motivated at all. Not saying I agree with his attitude, for the record, but that's modern football for you. It's the same with Pogba at United. He's wanted out for at least a couple of years and it shows in his performances.

Should have sold him in the summer and put that money into other areas of the team. It was obvious his heart wasn't going to be in it this season after he made it so blatantly clear he wanted to move on.

What a difference a week makes, don't think United could have had a much better opponent than Spurs after a 5-0 thrashing though.

First half Derby didn't turn up for whatever reason. We could and probably should have been out of sight by then. They woke up in the second half but didn't have the quality to even the score. Second half was disappointing from a Rovers perspective, but we held on so I'll take it and move on. In a way I'm glad we didn't move into 5th or 6th, as being outside the playoffs might delay the next death spiral a little longer.

ROH is going on "hiatus" but a good chance it's finished. They claim to be coming back in April but have released all of their talent from contract and their tape library from 2012 to the present is for sale to the highest bidder. Even if they do come back it will barely be the same entity at this point. Personally I've watched barely any ROH as I've always found their production values below what I can tolerate, but early ROH especially has left a huge legacy on the industry in terms of some of the stars it produced.

If he's referring to himself in third person like that then it is indeed!

It seems like they treat our FFP obligations in the same way the treat everything at the club - haphazardly and only reacting when they absolutely have to. Our finances had spiralled in 2015 to the point where we did enter a proper embargo and apparently were using emergency loans to cover expenses. At that point some action seemed to be taken as we were out of the embargo by January and they hired those two auditing firms - in summer 2016 if memory serves? After that it seems to have gone back to the old ways of letting us sail close to the wind in regards to FFP, and then acting when we were under the 'soft' embargo, perhaps using this buy and lease back 'trick' at the last minute to keep things balanced.

Sponsorships, merch, etc... it's been a while since what was happening on the pitch was #1 priority at Man Utd.

A shame they don't have the 'better to do something than nothing' attitude with the manager!

If it's related to creative FFP avoidance I'm not sure why you'd do it now as opposed to x amount of years ago. It's not like this loophole hasn't been known about before. If it was just for the sake of doing it before that loophole was closed then okay, I guess, but it seems like shuffling deck chairs on the titanic. They will need to drastically slash the club's running costs going forward, or it won't be long before FFP becomes an issue again, and next time they won't be able to buy another club asset to offset the costs. I was going to add 'or they could genuinely fund a promotion push with a proper manager' but we all know that's never happening.

I mean, it's no secret the club's structure is a joke. I've been banging on about it since the Bowyer days. The #1 issue at the club is not the manager, it's the inability of the owners to implement any kind of coherent foundation for any manager to have any success with. Mowbray has been financially backed to some degree, that much is true, but there is so much more to running a successful club at this or any other level. Being allowed to throw £7m or £5m at the odd player, regardless of ability, doesn't mean much when the fabric of the club itself is so obviously flawed. With that said there are things the manager does that are ridiculous, irrespective of how the club is structured. If Mowbray is regarded as a top coach by people in the game then good for him, but that doesn't excuse the way he speaks about some of our players in public, the bizarre formations and choices of personnel in certain positions, digs at the fans regarding the past or nonsense about formations not being important or not looking at the league table. At a normal club Mowbray would have been out on his arse some time ago after some of the horrendous runs we've endured under his watch, so whilst it must be difficult working for Venky's, he's also been very lucky in being allowed to continue here for as long as he has. In many ways he's benefited from the owners' inexplicable management style - even when getting the job in the first place. So, for me it goes both ways. The club is a basket case no matter how 'stable' things appear on the outside, and I do not foresee us ever being successful with the current owners at the helm. However, Mowbray has made plenty of big mistakes even taking that into account. His overall performance can be debated until the end of time, but there's no question he has gone stale here and like any manager who has been at a club for a long period of time, it eventually comes time to move on and try something else. The frustration comes from that obvious fact not being acknowledged by those in charge of the club, despite them acknowledging it before with the likes of Bowyer and Coyle. It leaves the impression of a rudderless ship being helmed by people who know their time is up but are willing to cruise along as we slowly sink beneath the waves. Although, with the amount of players out of contract this summer, we may not be too far away from suddenly capsizing completely.

Didn't have much of a choice considering what he paid for him tbf. Same with Gallagher - not sticking with them would have been a pretty horrendous look for Mowbray.