No easy games in the Championship, especially when you have one of the lowest budgets. I sense some are sharpening their knives in anticipation of our first league defeat. 🥹

What’s the Baker injury situation? Is he out for a while?

The dingle thread

I think it’s only at meal time kick offs that he gets triggered. He should be safe to play against at 3pm.

That depends on the context of the match, and how the team with 10 men choose to play. Arsenal defended their own 18 yard box against Citeh the other day with 10 men for 50 mins and Citeh didn’t have a clue how to break them down….until Arsenal went to sleep on a corner in the 97th minute.

It’s not a myth just because you say it is. If a team is down to ten men and have something to defend they will make it difficult for the opposition. Teams actually train for such scenarios, playing 10v11. if a team is already losing then it makes it very difficult as they have to try and chase the game.

We didn’t play particularly well and got a draw away from home. Last season when we played badly we got spanked quite a few times. The team is quite clearly more resilient. It’s probably not worth over-thinking.

It obviously means we are more resilient now than last season when it all fell apart under JDT… and when we capitulated to sheff weds and Bristol city under Eustace. so not that odd really.

Having a man advantage doesn’t necessarily translate to a win. We played not great and PNE played well. We’d have lost that game in previous seasons. No disappointment here.

Back on track? We’re unbeaten in 6. We couldn’t be more on track.

That’s a hilarious answer to why more money wasn’t spent in the transfer window. And they wonder why season ticket sales are shit.

Yep, he was awful yesterday but he’s been good in our home games this season.

Well you would if you wanted someone to drift inside and open up the wing for the attacking fullback. There’s a bit more to it than just playing a left footed wide player on the left.

So you accept our wingers are shit but want us to play traditional wingers.

PPG so far this season suggests it’s a more unequal league than normal. Early days obviously. excellent stats though, as Neil says.

Sexist

He was drifting inside under instruction from the manager.

I can’t remember if Eustace played 2 out and out wingers at Bham but he doesn’t seem to favour it here. I don’t think we have 1 good winger let alone 2 so maybe it’s just horses for courses. Maybe the Brighton lad will prove himself over the season but Dolan and Hedges are poor at Championship level as wingers.

If you don’t understand what he’s doing you can’t decide if he’s effective or not. You say you understand and then say he can’t play wide left without any context. Yeah, I know, it’s obvious what his role is. He opens up the flank by dropping inside into the pockets of space so that Beck can attack. Then he defends like a normal wide mid when we don’t have the ball. Saying he can’t play wide mid when he’s doing the job he’s asked to do is just silly. whether it’s the best use of a wide mid is really the question. RF99 will get there in the end.

He can play from the left in the role Eustace wants him to play. You keep making the mistake of thinking he is being played as a traditional wide mid/winger. He isn’t.

They also had him out of position!

Hedges for me, he had a lot of the ball in good areas and did nothing with it. Dolan was also poor.

Carer has been excellent this season, back to his best after recovery from injury impacted his game last season. But again, he made nowhere near the contributions Pears made yesterday. 3 excellent saves won us a point.

I thought his distribution was shite and he looked very slow on the turn. He won headers and was solid enough but he didn’t impact the game like Pears did.

Who was our best player if not Pears?