I think some people just get an idea in their head about a player and hold onto it regardless of evidence. I had an (apparently serious) conversation with someone recently about how Haaland is a 'massively overrated tap-in merchant'. His justifications were that a) the Bundesliga is a poor league that makes average players look good (he also didn't rate Bellingham for similar reasons) and b) that the City squad is so stacked and dominant that any striker would score a hatful there. I don't particularly like Rooney, but he was a top player for a very respectable number of years. Not convinced by him as a manager by a long shot.

I thought the story was that they just didn't like football or something? If so you'd think that would be a positive, something they have in common with the owners.

last minute red card for Norwich - hope he's important to their system, we need them to keep dropping points!

Yeah that's fair, but if we'd somehow got to this position this is definitely the game the wheels would fall off.

This feels like the game we'd fold under at pretty much any time in the last ten years. I might be putting too much on it but a good performance, even if we lose, would go a long way to making me think we might have a chance. Under Mowbray this would be a 4:0 get back in your lane and give up on the playoffs game* *this might not be 100% backed up by actual results, but it's damn sure where my expectations would be.

Not sure I see anything in Vale that suggests he's going to turn out good, but then a month or two ago I would have said the same about JRC. And Pears. Not going to worry about it right now. This is shaping up to be a much better season than I hoped all round.

Christ on a bendy bus we should have about seven up, this is unreal

Be hard pressed to say who our 'worst' performance is so far - couple of players who haven't had much to do, Pickering for example, but no-one who's been poor. Very solid performance.

We are second best, but not by much

Strong agree, sadly. I was very excited when we signed Markanday - Spurs fans suggesting he should have got a run in their first team off the back of very impressive performances for their reserves/u23s. A year or so in I am getting a bit concerned that he might be a prem Joe Nuttall - remember when he went on a run of something like 15 goals in 14 for the u23s? His career trajectory since then has been League 1 -> League 2 ->National league. I hope I'm wrong, but he's not even getting into the first 11 at Aberdeen at the moment - he's had about ten minutes in the last three games.

Just draws from here on out lads

Thomas is English born but a Welsh international - but yes, it's a rarity these days

We're only doing draws for the second half of the season, aren't we?

Don't hate it to be honest

I suppose there's an outside chance where everything is agreed with Villarreal but he's waiting to see if promotion is on the cards before actually signing the contract (it isn't)

Does the 3pm squad registration deadline apply to championship clubs too? If so surely we have to get an answer in the next hour either way. Edit - just seen the above, sack the board etc.

I thought forests squad was full, hence O'Brien playing here or not playing at all - if it turns out that he's got a squad space at forest he might not be too bothered about the outcome of the appeal.

'earn'

He's certainly made a few bad ones - that one in particular was awful - but over the course of the season I think his passing has been pretty good overall.

I genuinely think that Pickering could be good as a defensive midfielder - he's left footed for balance if played in a two, can tackle and pass and reads the game pretty well. He's just so slow that sometimes all of that is irrelevant at fullback, people just knock the ball past and there's not much he can do about it.

I have a memory that a while back - I think in the later prem years - we were linked with a youngster from a relatively obscure league. Someone on here edited his Wikipedia page to claim that he was the Bulgarian (or whatever, I forget where he was from) u21 100m record holder, with a time so stupidly Usain Bolt good that it should have been an obvious hoax. The next day actual newspapers went with 'rovers chase Bulgarian speed merchant' as a story.

Kilkenny got my Rovers side promoted in FM22, so he's probably rubbish in real life.

I mean yeah, you're not wrong, but before the new management team came in I would have looked at that 11 and thought that Ayala was done, Brereton would be sold by the start of the season and that Hedges was untested and generally perceived on here to be a bad signing who wasn't up to this level. I also thought that Dack was probably finished, Markanday coming back from a serious injury and to be honest I thought that the performances of Pickering, Dolan and Gally (and the rest to be fair) in the second half of last season were poor. So you are correct - I did misjudge the squad. I don't think unreasonably though, and I don't think I was the only one. At the end of last season I thought our lineup would be something like Kaminsky (good) Journeyman - Kid - Wharton(good) - Pickering Travis - Buckley Hedges - ? - Dolan Gallagher With a bench of kids and free league 1 pickups. My point really was that JDT and Broughton aren't doing a terrible job overall, strengthened fine and have actually done a good job at improving the players we have and bringing through youth sensibly. Hyam, Brittain and Szmodics all filled the gaps in the above that I was most concerned about. I also would have absolutely no faith in the previous management to have done as well. Again, I'm not saying that things are all sunshine and rainbows, we need the next couple of transfer windows to be decent, the players we have to keep improving and frankly we need to improve the performances, but I think overall this season is a long way from being disastrous from where we were.

Honestly I think back to before JDT and Broughton arrived, no manager, no clear hierarchy behind the scenes and half the squad seemingly gone (with BIG question marks over whether we would lose more of them, and the fitness of some of them) and I was genuinely afraid that we'd start the season unable to put out an 11 that wasn't completely padded with panic freebees and youngsters who weren't ready yet. I had no faith in any ability at the club to sort it out and genuinely expected, not feared, expected relegation. The fact that we ended up with something approaching a balanced first team with mostly adequate cover in all positions and with half the season gone could relatively realistically end up in the playoffs is something I would have bitten your hand off for. Only two teams in the last 8 or 9 seasons got relegated with more than the 42 points we're on right now (by far and away the highest of course being us, when we somehow managed it on 51). Now in hindsight Hirst and Mola didn't pan out, but we aren't going to lose much on them. I kind of think that by managing Dack back into fitness Szmodics has been made to look like an unnecessary signing. If Dack's knees had completely gone and he'd been sent to the glue factory Szmodics would have played more of a role, and might have looked a bit more effective. It was no way near as bad a window as some people are making out. Jury's still out though - don't mistake me for a 'happy clapper', we need to improve a fair bit. We don't deserve to be as high as third, but seeing as we are this is an opportunity to build on what we've got and improve into the second half of the season. If they can do that rather than the inevitable Mowbray death spiral I'll call it a pretty successful first season.

Mourinho as an international manager is an odd one - how is he going to scapegoat a player? Pick someone to call up for every squad just to not play them and slag them off in the press?