DE.

After an impressive start Edwards seems to have lost his way a bit at Ipswich. A lot of talk of him running into a lot of blind alleys with little end product. Obviously difficult to judge with Hurst as manager and being surrounded by some very poor players. The times I've seen him playing for Ipswich he's always looked dangerous, and he could have been a viable alternative to Chapman (particularly as he can actually stay fit for longer than a couple of weeks).

Computer simulation theory is pretty cool. I'm hitching my horse to that wagon. Not sure what description that falls under - technostic? Did not expect to come into this thread and see such heavy debate/arguments going on. I do wonder how the England team back then would have progressed if Hoddle had stayed on though. He had some really wacky ideas but we looked good in France 98 and still had a solid group of players going into Euro 2000. Whether Hoddle would have lasted past that I don't know, as England managers have always had fairly short shelf lives.

Well, I think the obvious decision is to put Leutwiler in goal so I don't think it comes down to loyalty in this instance, just common sense.

Tbf if that was the case teams would constantly be picking up goalies from the lower divisions. You can get decent shot stoppers anywhere, but as the intelligence and talent of the teams you face increases so does the need to make accurate and quick decisions, whilst also making very few mistakes as they get more costly the higher up the pyramid you go. That's what tends to seperate the good goalies from the average/bad ones. Decision making and confidence are both bred largely from experience, and if you haven't had experience of playing against a better quality of opposition then you're likely going to struggle.

Mowbray brought him to England in 2012 when he was manager of Middlesbrough.

Yeah, but he was definitely considered backup when we picked him up. https://www.shropshirestar.com/sport/football/shrewsbury-town-fc/2017/08/02/jayson-leutwiler-departs-shrewsbury-town-for-blackburn-rovers/ That said he's still better than Jason Steele.

Leutweiler's name takes some effort to spell correctly, which is annoying. That aside he was Shrewsbury's back up keeper when we bought him, so logically you'd have to assume he probably isn't a Championship standard keeper. We might get through with him in the nets for a couple of games, but if we're talking long term then I think it's inevitable it will cost us a few points (as Kean and Eastwood did on a regular basis a few years ago, although granted both were much less experienced). For the time being it is what it is, hopefully he'll see this as an opportunity to impress and put on a hell of a performance.

From another link on that story: https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/17719839 "I said: 'We need you to play today'," stated Kean. "[But] he was nowhere near in the right frame of mind to do it. "I can't get inside somebody's head, I can only say how much we and his team-mates need him." "We need guys who want to play even if they are injured or their heads are not quite right. If you look at David Dunn with his hamstring, he is having injections to play. "But I would rather keep the conversation between myself and Gael private." I love that final line, after he's basically thrown Givet under the bus anyway. What a dignified man wee Stevie is.

I was so disappointed when Petrovic turned out to be a flop. He'd always been great for me on FM so had been looking forward to him grabbing the PL by the scruff of the neck. It was obviously just too difficult with my guidance Modeste obviously turned out to be decent, but my only memory of him here is him getting sent off. Can't remember the match but it summed everything up at the time. Vukcevic was a talented footballer but a total nutcase. I guess that's why we picked him up for £2m. Yeah, JJ was the 2011 January window. He was a big part of the reason we kept our heads above water that season. Petrovic was unfortunately nowhere near the same level.

I guess you could count Scott Dann as a decent buy, but that was the best we got. Yak turned out OK too. Then we had Myles Anderson (just lol, and this guy still managed to get employed in Italy, no doubt through some kind of Kentaro connection), Goodwillie, Petrovic, Bruno Ribiero (aka the Brazilian Denis Irwin), Simon Vekcevic, Jordan Slew, Tim Payne (wtf happened to him?), the other Olsson twin, Modeste and the cherry on top of the shit sundae, Bradley Orr. Dismal. And those last three came in January when we were already in trouble and desperately in need of reinforcements. And we let Samba leave after the transfer window closed, ensuring we couldn't get in a replacement, so another good job there. We also released Ryan Nelsen and froze out Salgado. Well done Keano.

Widely known to have been written by Nixon, but yeah a total and absolute load of BS. Now Ipswich fans can look forward to much of the same for the next two months. Although Simeon Jackson, Grant Holt and Elliot Ward aren't quite as glamorous.

A lot of people seem to think this forum and our fans exist in some kind of bubble with unique reactions to matches, managers, players, etc. Fact is it's the same across the land. That's what makes football a universal language, and why it's so easy to strike up a conversation with a total stranger about their club even if you know little about their team.

Ipswich fans were willing to give Hurst time up until the QPR match, basically. After that they really turned on him and performances just disintegrated to the point where it became obvious it wasn't going to work out. There's a similar divide across the Ipswich fans to us and Allardyce years ago. Pro-Mick fans blaming the anti-Mick fans for what's happened, anti-Mick fans saying he had to go and it isn't their fault Evans brought in the wrong person. All very familiar. The one thing most of them are in agreement over is that the current team is severely lacking quality and won't survive without reinforcements in January. It remains to be seen whether Evans will back Lambert in Jan, but they can't write the next two months off or they'll be sunk anyway. I saw a few of them talking about Lambert taking Bennett and Graham from us, as if either would go to Ipswich. There's some strong delusion on there. Most of them seem to think Mowbray would have gone there in the summer as well if they'd been serious about getting him. Absolutely no chance Mowbray would have left us for Ipswich imo, and I said as much at the time. A lot of them seem to be in denial about their current standing in the footballing landscape.

I give up.

Some confusion and questions, sure, but somehow the only post talking about Tony losing the plot is focused on. I wonder why?

At best that was one or two posters, although from the reaction of some you'd assume the entire board wanted Mowbray put in the stocks. Most of us were just a bit baffled by the team selection. In the positivity sub forum such a horrific response could be outlawed though. Only praise for the team selection and formation. No need to read those terrible posts that dare to question the manager's unassailable wisdom.

Can we not create a "Positive Posts Only" sub-forum where posters who can't stand to see any remotely critical opinion of Tony or the team are allowed to post in peace? Not even joking at this point. I'm getting bored of these types of posters constantly derailing match threads and picking fights with other people trying to have a balanced debate. Make it so that any remotely negative post on this sub-forum causes a user to be banned for life from said sub-forum. Only positives. Call it "In Tony We Trust". Make it so.

That's not modidied, though, It's a direct quote from the man who wrote the article. The Rovers boss will be handed around £50m by the new owners. What part of that is ambiguous to you? He's not saying "if the Venkys were going to buy all the players that they claimed they would", as you suggested, although if you can find me that quote I'd be interested to see it.

Did you even read the link? Literally in the first two paragraphs:

Probably said it on this very messageboard in one of those trainwreck 11 o'clocker threads. Not going to bother going back to trawl through them, but this isn't one of those things where a lie is repeated so often it becomes the truth. Nixon made the claim (as evidenced in that link) and concocted a laundry list of players that never came anywhere near the club.

Can't tell if this is sarcasm or not, but for reference anyway: http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/blackburn-set-to-splash-50m-on-summer-1698580

Coming from the same guy who said we had a £50m warchest I think I'll take a wait and see approach on anything Nixon says. Ipswich do need investment if they want to survive though. Their current team isn't good enough to compete, Hurst really did a number on them.

Because Leutweiller isn't a Championship calibre goalkeeper. We might get away with it if it's only for a game or two, but any more than that and I think we'll lose points as a result. Raya has won us a number of points this season already with some outstanding saves. Maybe Leutweiller can do the same, but until that's proven to be the case I'm going to be pretty concerned.

To be fair, if he sees you as negative then the rest of us must seem like the most dark-hearted, callous scoundrels to ever claim to support a football club.

I'd say he probably did overachieve with our relegated team to some degree (although we weren't as bad as the table suggested when he arrived, a lot of the players had just had the talent and enthusiasm coached out of them), and he's doing about as you'd expect with the current group. Maybe a little better. As we saw last year, Tony has a habit of over-complicating things and we're seeing that again now with this strange attempt at playing a strikerless system. Mowbray's obviously a deep thinker when it comes to football, but sometimes he thinks a bit too much. I can't see us getting relegated under him as long as he's suitably backed by the owners, but at the same time I'd be surprised if we got promoted unless the squad sees significant improvement.