4 minutes ago, garnersfags said:

I thought Hedges played well, until he approached the box. He was instrumental in the amount of possession Swansea conceded. End product will improve.

 

 

I don't know why some people are having a go at Hedges. He was one of our better players and should have stayed on the pitch. Buckley was on a yellow and having a terrible game, he should have been hooked. 

4 minutes ago, AllRoverAsia said:

Very true. On chances we should have won. I can think of no excuse for the miss by Buckley. A shocker by any standard.

Not sure it was even the worst miss of the game, though!!! Watch Lenihan's again, he's literally a few feet out. Honestly hard to tell which was harder to miss!

Mowbray could have done things differently today, but we've lost that game because we missed two gilt-edged chances that had no business being missed. 

End of the day, we missed some absolute sitters. Shockers.

We can quibble about lots of things about tonight, but they are the reason we don't have three points. We missed two open goals from the six-yard box. We've thrown away the points tonight. 

Just now, danger19_80 said:

We'll either go up or he'll be gone at the end of the season. Some kind of relief.

Far more likely that neither of those will happen, tbh. 

Lenihan again...it's not our day. 

Two sitters missed. We should have been leaving with three points.

That miss was even worse than Buckley's...shocker. 

Get someone on the front corners for crying out loud...Khedra can never kick 'em farther than that!

Didn't seem to anything up with Nyambe. Tactical?

Have we gone to four at the back with Lenihan on the right?

1 minute ago, J*B said:

Does Joe Rothwell look 100% committed for 17 cup finals to anyone else? I found Hedges interview interesting, paraphrasing but ‘my head was turned and I couldn’t give everything to Aberdeen’.

He's playing like he's played for much of the season, tbh. 

Khedra and Diaz getting ready to come on.

Good to see we're going for it. 

They're down to ten men! We MUST go for the win now...

Surely if BBD can play for half an hour then he'll be fine for 45 minutes too. 

How tired can he be? He's 22 years old and been sat on his arse for the last hour, I'm sure he can run up and down the pitch a little bit, ffs.

Get BBD on, Tone...we're throwing this game away.

They're shit but we have the guy who just scored against the South American champions on the bench...

The sitter that Buckley missed looks worse and worse every time you watch. We should be 1-1 now. 

Good run from Hedges and a good ball through....absolutely nobody at all in the centre for him to even considering sliding it in for. If Buckley is supposed to be up front, then why was he hanging around near the halfway line watching? 

We desperately need BBD on at half time, not the bloody 60th minute. We need to still aim for the three points from today, they're there for the taking. 

This game is there for the taking but we have nothing up front. 

edit - want to see the replay first. 

Buckley misses an absolute sitter. Disgraceful attempt. 

Man in job tries to get better job with a far better package. It didn't happen, but he's doing nothing wrong as long as he gives his all for the rest of his contract now that it's fallen through.

He helps inspire us to promotion, or even just the play offs, then if he does leave in the summer then he'll leave as having been an excellent signing.

Promotion this season will be a far greater achievement than getting up from League One with the squad we had then compared to the rest of League One.

Mowbray mentioned wanted to get players in to replace him. The time is ripe for him to leave.

Surely he's almost certainly gone by the end of tomorrow?

4 hours ago, arbitro said:

We are on the verge of signing Hedges in not dissimilar circumstances to Rothwell potentially leaving us. Both appear to have had their heads turned by the promise of more money and a new contract. I know Rothwell has actually asked for a move but keeping him against his wishes will be folly for me. Mowbrays subdued interview yesterday told me he is planning for a future without Rothwell and I agree with that. Whether it derails our season remains to be seen but I don't think we should dwell on it and hopefully the players and management won't too.

It's football and we could be in exactly the same situation next January as more important players contracts enter their final six months.

Yes, exactly this. Not sure why so many get emotional at times like this...outside of a few players, the vast majority are just employed by the club for a while.

We've known Rothwell was not going to sign a contract for some time now. If we haven't been scouting replacements, that's on the club. He wants to leave, fine...let him.  Get him out, don't risk the squad morale by keeping him and get in a replacement.

This only becomes an issue if we don't deal with it professionally. Get the best deal we can for him, move on, get someone else on. Window closes = focus totally on our promotion bid and...Joe who?!??!

20 hours ago, LordBaltimore said:

You can argue more slots for UEFA or CONMEBOL based on the "quality" of the threshold teams vs africa & especially asia & north américa. 

Is the European Championship any easier to win than the World Cup? Not much, if at all. Other than Brazil and Argentina, no non-European side have reached the final in the past 70 years. Last time, Italy and the Netherlands missed out, there's pretty much never been a non-European team of that quality ever missing out on the world cup, surely? That said, it's quite right that if it's to be a world cup then Europe cannot dominate more than it already does.

If FIFA really wanted to promote football further as the world game...they must have considered how they can get the likes of China and India in on wild cards. In 2018, the world's five most populous nations were not represented at the FIFA World Cup (China, India, US, Indonesia, Pakistan) and it's likely they'll try and have some countries qualifying automatically eventually, a bit like happens with the Eurovision Song Contest when the UK doesn't have to qualify but nobody votes for us because nobody in Europe seems to like us much. Oh, and our songs are bloody awful, but aren't they all?

4 hours ago, Bbrovers2288 said:

Tell me rothwell tells souness halfway through a promotion changing season that he is jumping ship without being put through a wall 

To be fair, Souness got rid of a load of dead wood when he came in. We reaped the benefits...but where was the loyalty then? How about in the past year? Elliot Bennett was a good servant for us...we mostly wanted him out a good year or two before he left. Same with Downing and Evans. Bell and Holtby; tough titty, bye!! Rothwell? Oh no...we don't want you to go, you're playing well. Why won't you just stay six months? Why won't you think of the club, the fans etc? 

Football fans have no real loyalty to anyone, solely to the club. Why would any player have loyalty to them? I'm the same...as soon as Rothwell leaves, I don't care if he does well or not. I won't actually wish them to fail but I'm ambivalent if they succeed. 

1 hour ago, Bbrovers2288 said:

Can’t imagine this happening to us in the souness promotion 

We were spending left, right and centre that season. Brought in the likes of Hignett, Marcus Bent, Freidel, Curtis, Mahon, Bjornebye. We'd have offered Rothwell the likes of money to have had him signed up again at this point.

We're punching above our weight considering the financial considerations, in that year we were a division below where we should have been to start with. If you want to compare 2000-01 to present times, then it's more comparable to our year in League One. Both times we were the big spenders and able to improve the team, too.

What Mowbray's done this season so far is as impressive as any performance since, perhaps, the days of Don Mackay. Who would have predicted that after the one win in 15 last season, or even after the home tonking by Fulham?!?

This was a case of putting the point in the bag and moving on. Tough opponents at a tough ground with a depleted squad and in-game injuries to boot. You can say it's points dropped, but that's only if you focus on one weekend rather than a whole season. None of our promotion rivals have so far won at Luton, in fact the likes of Bournemouth and Fulham lost there so we can think of it as a point gained on some. 

Considering the circumstances, it's a good result. You can't win them all, so drawing those you can't win is better than losing them! We're in second place still after 29 games played, bring on Swansea!