In fairness from what I've read on their forums a lot of their fans are being quite realistic and accept that a mid-table finish would be solid for a first season back in the Championship. The main sentiment from those who expect a playoff place is that it's a poor league and if there is a genuine shot at the playoffs every season counts, regardless of initial expectations. Also a somewhat fair point. They all accept that their recruitment team/board screwed them over by not bringing in a striker in January - not too dissimilar to us in that regard.

Even if we ultimately fall out of the playoff spots this season, it won't compare to the absolute disaster that was the last few months of the 2021/22 season. It almost felt as bad as being relegated, and was compounded by the utter inevitability of that end of season collapse that we'd all become accustomed to under the last manager. Even if we finish outside of the playoffs JDT has shown enough to have earned backing from all parties in the summer. Just have to hope he's still around at the start of next season.

Your lads deserved it tonight. Looking like you're building a decent foundation for next season with Neil in charge. Expect you'll be in and about the top six again next season, the benefits of having a manager who has been there and done it in the recent past.

We started playing roughly 86 minutes too late. Until then we simply didn't fancy it on a cold night in Stoke. Oh well, on the plus side our GD isn't quite so badly impacted now. Little choice but to move on, and hopefully JDT can work out why we suddenly went back to no-showing an away game against opposition we should be competing with. Leaving it until the 86th minute isn't good enough.

What a shitshow. Nobody can bring their fans back down to Earth with a crashing thud quite like Rovers.

Per BBC... of course.

Anyone between 1-11 based on this half.

It's unlikely Linekar needs the money at this point, so if he wants to take a stance then good for him.

Pretty much. XG can be meaningful and add significant value to a model that incorporates other relevent statistics, but on its own can only reveal a small piece of the overall puzzle.

They used to play football on plastic (thesefootballtimes.co) A good article here on the plastic pitches of the 70s and 80s. An interesting read.

Eh, you'd have to be pretty naive as a manager to go into the Watford job presuming you'll last much longer than six months if you haven't met expectations. No manager is going there in ignorance anymore, and they never have an issue getting someone new in - presumably because the job is a bit of a jackpot. If you do well then you do well and your reputation increases. If you don't then you're likely to get paid at least double what you've worked, if not more, and in future job interviews can point to Watford's high managerial turnover as a reasonable excuse as to why things didn't work out. Better their way than hanging on to the likes of Mowbray for 5 years.

Stoke have some players who should be excellent at this level, but if they were a good or consistent team they wouldn't be 16th. It's a potential banana peel but certainly no reason to expect we'll drop points here.

Tbf considering Sunderland's next opponents, right about now would be a good time for the spiral to end...

One of their fans on that thread summed it up pretty much perfectly: "Even when we were playing well, it always seemed in spite of Mowbray, that he had stumbled onto something without quite knowing why. When it stops working he doesn't have an answer, just hopes to stumble onto something else that works." Exactly what it felt like when he was here as well, hence the constant see-sawing form.

I'm curious as to how he explains it away at interviews. Do the interviewers even ask about it? The pattern is so obvious that you'd be negligent not to, and yet...

Yep, good of old Tone to keep the tradition going and give us one less competitor for the top six.

Another outstanding result. As Tim Flowers would say, these lads have got bottle.

Done well to get to HT at 1-0. Need a regroup and ideally an early second half goal to ease the pressure a little.

Need to weather this storm, let them keep coming forward and then pick them off with another counter for a second. Becomes a very different game at that point. If we concede then it'll become a difficult afternoon.

Our confidence is sky high, you can just see it across the team. What a time to be building this kind of momentum.

Even worse when you consider VAR was available. Ref misses something which was blatantly a red, a clear and obvious error... what reason was there not to use VAR to confirm it was a sending off? Particularly when they showed replays of the incident on TV.

If Mowbray was still here we'd already have lost practically every game in February and be resigned to our fate.

Really pleased that JRC's injury appears to have not been serious.

Arma will just be extremely low on confidence and rusty from limited first team appearances. I'm sure as a player he hasn't fallen apart completely. I wouldn't have him back here for the reasons @tomphilstated, but I think at the right club he could be effective. With that said we should also consider how JDT has managed to get players like Dack working to the preferred style - maybe he could do the same for Armstrong. I highly doubt he'll be back here in the near future regardless, but I wouldn't rule out Tomasson being able to mould Arma into a genuine team player whilst still retaining his goal threat.

I'd be happy with a draw, but a win would be dangerous as at that point I think I'd genuinely start to believe we could be able to do the unthinkable. That would be some feat for JDT to achieve, considering how crushed I was after we threw it away in such disgusting fashion last season. Still, realistically our good run will falter at some point and it's realistic to pinpoint this match as that moment. As long as we give it a Bowyeresque "right good go" and don't lose something like 4-0 I'll accept whatever the end result is.