DE.

Rothwell to start every week please.

"Joe has to take the blame for today's 4-3 defeat I'm afraid. He may have scored all three goals, cleared two off the line and run the most yards on the pitch, but the lad needs to think about his positional play and his team game."

It's almost like Mowbray is trolling us and Rothwell by selecting him to start and then picking that team to surround him.

We can only hope Tony took Evans to a hypnotist during the week and now he thinks this is an international match.

Gallagher and Armstrong in the same team is statistically very bad news. Combine with Bell at LB and an Evans/Bennett CM pairing (lol) and it's almost like Mowbray wants to lose. No wonder he said they'd probably be better than us if this was the team he had in mind.

You're absolutely right that successful teams have strong, vocal leaders across the entire pitch. Not sure we have any at all.

Don't think he'll walk and think it's way too early for him to be sacked. Even Coyle wasn't removed until February.

Just watched NXT... Belair Vs Ripley - really solid women's match. Both have the potential to be stars as long as they stay in NXT. WWE would ruin both on the main roster. Riddles Vs Grimes - really liked this one. Riddle is another absolute star. Wonder if they're going to do anything with him and Goldberg? It would have to end with Riddle going over, otherwise there's no point. Breezango & Scott Vs The Forgotten Sons - eh, was fine I guess. It's nice to see Breezango doing something at least, although I wish they were still doing the Fashion Files. Angel Garza Vs Jack Gallagher - Standard 205 Live fare. It was okay but I don't care enough about the characters to get that into it. Nox/Kai Vs Duke/Shafir - short but fine for a TV match. I liked the Kabuki Warriors promo, which ironically was better than most of the other promos on the show despite being 90% in Japanese and therefore unintelligible to me. Strong Vs Lee Vs Dijakovic - very good triple threat match, Takeover quality level. I like that they had Strong go over without having the Undisputed Era help him. Heels need to get clean wins to be considered legitimate. The post-match angle with the UE & Ciampa/Gargano/Balor was well done too. You could see Balor's turn coming but it was still executed well and the crowd reaction was great. I like that they left it open as to whether Balor had joined the Undisputed Era or whether he was working alone. I still preferred AEW overall but it was still a very strong show from NXT. Both Wednesday night shows blow Raw & Smackdown out of the water. They're practically a different form of entertainment at this point. On a side note I didn't think much of the promos on NXT this week. I don't like the picture-in-picture promos where they have the guy staring off-centre from the camera. It just looks weird (also the promos felt really scriped and not natural at all). Pete Dunne's promo was pretty meh as well. At least they are doing promos though. Other than Cody & Jericho nobody else seems to be allowed to speak on Dynamite. Their matches are great but AEW needs to add a bit more promo time to help push along storylines and develop some of the characters. WWE does give their wrestlers promo time but it comes across as scripted and fake which is a problem. You can tell the difference between a wrestler like Flair or Hogan just winging it versus most of the other roster members, and the former always comes across as more authentic and interesting even if not every bullet point is hit.

Don't think Rodwell would make a blind bit of difference. Has the same attitude as most of our players - looked decent when we're in control, totally disappeared when we were under the cosh. Also a pretty rubbish CB which is where he'd likely be playing if he was here.

Just shows how desperate he is, when he's reaching to those depths to try and defend the shit he's serving up. We should NEVER have been in League 1 in the first place. The only reason we ended up there was because of the horrific decision to appoint Owen Coyle. Mowbray proved when he came in that we had enough to survive, and in almost any other season 51 points would have seen us stay up comfortably. We romped out of League 1 without even playing well because our players were far too good for that division and didn't even need to be anywhere near their best to win most matches. We literally sold nobody from a team that got 51 points the previous season in the Championship, bought the best player in League 1 and then a bunch of other players who were pretty much all playing at Championship level before they came here. Downing the only major exception I can think of off the top of my head. Even with all of those advantages, and I believe the highest wage bill in the division by some disance, we still had to settle with finishing second. Grateful to get out of League 1 at the first attempt, but we had a lot going for us and were far too good for that division. It would have been an epic and unforgiveable failure if we hadn't gotten promoted. I think Mowbray pretty much said that himself at the time, so to now bring it up as if we're a newly promoted lower league team getting to grips with the fearsome Championship is nonsense. Stop coming up with ridiculous excuses and just admit this is not good enough!

Even the Facebook lads are raging over these insanely stupid quotes, and they're rarely critical of anybody other than fellow fans.

Had to "earn his place" past the mighty Lenihan, Williams, Mulgrew, Nyambe, Grayson and Platt as well. No wonder he told us to do one.

We went on our worst run of results ever under Venky's (including the Steve Kean era) under Mowbray last year and he was safe as houses. Don't think results are going to matter unless we're adrift and then it'll be too late, so we might as well keep hoping for wins even they are becoming less and less likely as Mowbray wraps himself in contradictions and nonsense.

As far as being up for the fight I don't believe him. These players haven't been up for the fight since he arrived, hence our disgustingly poor statistics when it comes to falling behind in games. We only perform when we have a massive advantage in terms of talent or when we score first. The quote itself is horribly worded but I think it reveals a lot about TM's mentality and how he views our club. It's the kind of quote you'd expect if we were playing Liverpool or Man City - not Preston North End!

What the absolute fuck is this? He has totally lost it.

Another absolutely fantastic Dynamite show this week. Every match was good to great, and the big brawl between the Inner Circle and Cody/Dustin/MJF/DDP was a ton of fun. The crowd being so into everything makes the show so much better. Will be watching NXT tomorrow. Audiences for this week: Dynamite 963,000, NXT 698,000. Both dropped again, however considering the strong basketball & world series competition those are still pretty good numbers for both show. AEW is still in the top 5 for cable shows, actually moved up from 5th to 4th this week.

Ffs, we'll be lucky not to finish in the bottom six at this rate let alone 'hopefully the top six' !

The stats obviously suggest at a basic level that you'd pick Gallagher over Armstrong, however there are a lot of factors not being shown. Our team selection, who the opposition were, where Arma/Gallagher were playing on the pitch, individual goals/assists, etc. So they only tell some of the story. Really you would need to wait for both to have played at least 20-25 games before starting to get any really meaningful statistics. These are really just an early indicator.

Raw & Smackdown are still absolute shit. Ratings on Smackdown have been tanking since week 1 on FOX and will continue to drop because the show is frankly terrible.I imagine it'll settle around the 1.8-2m viewer range, right where they were on USA. I watch NWA every Wednesday. I like that it's usually under an hour. It's a pretty easy watch - nothing mind-blowing but nice to have on in the background whilst I'm working on my laptop.

Here's a stat attack for anybody interested in such things. I took a look at the effectiveness of Danny Graham, Sam Gallagher and Adam Armstrong based on them starting matches. Results below - other than league apps all stats are team stats, not individual. I whipped this up kinda quickly so forgive any statistical errors. Danny Graham: 4 league starts W: 1 (25%) D: 2 (50%) L: 1 (25%) Goals Scored: 4 (1 goal per game) Goals Conceded: 5 (1.25 goals per game) - note that 4 of these were against QPR! Points: 5/12 (41% of maximum possible) Sam Gallagher: 10 league starts W: 3 (30%) D: 2 (20%) L: 5 (50%) Goals Scored: 9 (0.9 goals per game) Goals Conceded: 12 (1.2 goals per game) Points: 11/30 (36% of maximum possible) Adam Armstrong: 11 league starts W: 3 (27%) D: 1 (10%) L: 7 (63%) Goals Scored: 12 (1.1 goal per game) Goals Conceded: 14 (1.3 goals per game) Points: 10/33 (30% of maximum possible) --- Goes without saying that the stats don't make particularly good reading for AA. We lose far more often and concede more goals when he starts compared to Graham or Gallagher. We also get less points. Obviously should be noted that Graham's sample size is a lot smaller than Gallagher or Armstrong. I also took a look at games SG/AA have started together Vs. games where they haven't. League games Armstrong & Gallagher have started together: 8 W: 2 (25%) D: 1 (12%) L: 5 (63%) Goals Scored: 8 (1 goal per game) Goals Conceded: 12 (1.5g goals per game) Points: 7/24 (29% of maximum possible) League games Armstrong & Gallagher haven't started together: 5 W: 2 (40%) D: 2 (40%) L: 1 (20%) Goals Scored: 7 (1.4 goals per game) Goals Conceded: 6 (1.2 goals per game) Points: 8/15 (53% of maximum possible) --- So the takeaway from this seems kind of obvious... don't play SG and AA in the same team. Or at least, not in the way we have been using them. Whatever we're doing when they're both on the pitch together it is not working.

Considering at the start of the season there was considerable chatter about us being 'dark horses' for a top six spot, it's pretty tragic that by the end of October we're already worrying about trying to avoid relegation.

Correct. Our club is a graveyard for players with any remote sense of individuality or creative flair. Dack is the only exception to this and it feels like that's in spite of the system rather than because of it.

I usually watch Dynamite on Thursday and then NXT on Friday - the latter has been a bit bland the last couple of weeks so I'll look forward to watching it tomorrow.

Especially funny when you read Mowbray saying he doesn't care about possession and only about scoring goals. It's in total contradiction with what we see with our own eyes - if we don't care about possession then why does our gameplan seem to revolve around having so much of it and doing so little with it? If it was a one off or had only happened in a few matches then fine, but as you say we have had more possession than the opposition in 12 of our 15 matches. That's not a coincidence, it's a deliberate pattern that clearly shows our game plan is based around keeping the ball. Unfortunately that same game plan rarely leads to useful shots on goal or indeed any shots on target at all. It's so ineffective that it's actually a genuine surprise when we score a goal, and if we go a goal behind then you can forget us winning the match. It never happens. Again this is the kind of thing a proper journalist would bring up with Mowbray when he makes nonsense comments - but they never do. He's given carte blanche to say whatever he wants without being questioned by anyone. The only time he ever gets pulled up is at the Q&A sessions, but then he just tells everyone what they want to hear before proceeding to fulfil none of his promises. Defenders are coming.

Dack is not anywhere close to the top of the list when it comes to our issues on the pitch. No player is going to be effective all the time - his stats show how valuable he is to us over the course of a season, irrespective if he has a few off games or spends portions of matches on the fringes. If our other players contributed anything worthwhile then his limitations would be less obvious, but much like JR, because the rest of the team is so limited and all eyes are on the star man to produce something his faults are scrutinised in far more detail than, imo at least, is warranted. Can you imagine where we'd be without Dack? We'd practically have zero creativity in the team at all. Theoretically it's possible Rothwell would produce but that's far from a certainty - in fact it's far from a certainty Mowbray would even select him - and Rothwell has come in for exactly the same criticisms as Dack, so it's unlikely much would change other than less goals and assists in the team. I look at the likes of Gallagher, Armstrong, Bennett, Johnson, Bell, Williams (at LB), Walton and think why even bother mentioning Dack? He's so far from being our biggest issue that discussing his weaknesses is practically irrelevant.