Zoob

Yeah, I think when he's played, you can see some of his limitations - he used to be decently quick and how he's very slow, but as you say - when Gakpo can hardly move, he's still picked ahead of Chiesa. And Chiesa is one of the few players that does actually look like he's willing to run through a brick wall (like a few games back where he was the only player back defending and cleared it off the line).

You'd think Southgate and Ratcliffe would be a good English match made in heaven.

It really is a special sort of achievement. The kind of thing we laugh at Chelsea for doing.

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I'm not 100% on the Slot out bandwagon either, but that's mostly because I'm not sure about who would replace him and it could always get worse. I think Slot has kinda been left short (Salah is the only player away at AFCON), but we did just have a record breaking spend in the summer - allbeit not really where we needed to spend / maybe not on the right players. And it could be that he was left short AND isn't the right man for the job. And I don't really want to see any DOF doing interviews, whether things are going well or not.

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The above is all damning him with faint praise, which is a realistic assessment of where we are. Yep - it's good we haven't lost 7 in 9 again, but as you (and most of us here) can see, we're s*** and playing with no intensity or purpose. And we spent 300 million on attacking players we don't know how to use. Thank f*** Ekitike has looked good despite everything else. As for the dressing rom - I don't think they want him as manager. If they did, they'd run through walls, as they did under Klopp. Rare to see players in only the second season with a manager where they've kinda given up (like in the last year of Rodgers for example)

Does 5th qualify for CL again, or will that depend on how far the English clubs go? (which unless it's us going far, could result in some disgusting wanting teams we hate to go further, but not too far...). Thank goodness the likes of Spurs, Mancs and Chelsea are as s*** as we are.

Yeah, this is how I see it too. Not arrogance, but confusion and malaise. Successful teams all have an identity. Arsenal are boring as f***, but they score from set pieces press relentlessly, and have creative players that actually create stuff when they're not scoring from set pieces. Us and City at their best, controlled possession but knew when to up the tempo and make incisive runs and passes. We have no identity. Even Fulham played more coherent purposeful football today, and looked exactly what they are - a mid table team. I've got no idea what our players are trying to do most of the time, and it looks like they don't either.

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We won fewer league games in 2025 than Villa. It's weird when all the talk was of how similar Slot was to Klopp, but there's no pressing, no urgency, no quick counter attack, no defensive structure, no running through a wall for the team. Other than that, they're pretty much twins. I'd love him to succeed, because he won us the league, had to deal with Jota's death, and seems like a good guy...But all of us can see how utterly clueless and pointless our football is, and with the players we have that has to be down to Slot.

You sure he can't play again for us this season? He's not coming back anyway, but if he did, I don't see why he couldn't play. I really feel bad for him because he left the club he loved and moved in order to further his career, and has been treated absolutely terribly by Villa and stagnated even more than if he'd stayed here.

Can we have another international break instead?

We have a load of problems, but one of them is that we have no consistency and no good relationships on either flank. For years we had TAA and Salah on one side, and Robbo and Mane on the other. Now, we have Gakpo hating on Kerkez (actually Kerkez and Wirtz were beginning to look promising) and then a rotating list of people all down our right hand side. Makes it even harder to have any fluidity or consistency. We don't press, we don't counter at speed, and we are terrible against a low block. Pretty sure we have the highest possession stats in the league, but it's like having the ball for the sake of it - rather than to actually you know, go try to score a goal or something.

Clueless, aimless s***. what are we even trying to do? It's like a form of football I've never seen before, and for good reason. Hey, let's play really, really, slow, take it to the edge of their box, and then pass backwards. Then repeat. FFS

Ornstein saying it's gonna be Liam Rosenior as new Chelsea manager, (he manages Strasbourg, one of the other clubs they own). This could go comically bad (again). Good stuff.

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I hate that football and set piece FC has made me want City to win.

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Yeah. I assume you mean the bit where he passed it to himself in the build up (and thankfully Kerkez didn't f*** it up)? That was so crazy, it didn't quite look realistic.