too right can't be havin with red anything...now blue lipstick *lightbulb moment. Mrs Degsy's prezzie sorted
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too right can't be havin with red anything...now blue lipstick *lightbulb moment. Mrs Degsy's prezzie sorted
degsy's corollary states: you're only as good as your NEXT result ( the last one is already history )
Bright eyes, burning like fire...
Chang Elephant
Forum God
He's gonna find it difficult when we play Murder Inc in the semis
The Esk
Player Valuation: £70m
I think that is an unrealistically low target Dave, given the talent Martinez has accumulated and developed within the squad. It is almost certainly a lower target than the targets the likes of Lukaku and Deulofeu (and others I hope) have personally.
A Final appearance and EL qualification is a minimum requirement, and realistically to match our leading player's ambitions a cup success and CL qualification ideally.
Given the competition and the considerable difference in resources it is a huge ask but one we can meet if we can play to our potential consistently. There's only a tiny margin of error though to meet these ambitions and success or not will be determined by the outcome of a small number of games.
However against the odds we have a team and manager capable of achieving such ambitions.
Any time of day is the wrong time of day for Art Garfunkel.
Back to Roberto, I think a lot of us expected much worse, and even for him possibly to have been sacked by now.
I love the way we go forward. We must be one of the most dangerous teams in the world for that. The only criticism I have for him is that he's a little too Gung Ho - I feel he'd rather lose a game 5-6 than scrape a 1-0 win. I know he says we're not set up to keep clean sheets, which is fine if we defend as a team but you can't base every game's tactics on "we'll score more than you". He needs to be more adaptive. And he needs to see that clean sheets do help
Although it takes a little while, he does seem to learn from mistakes mostly - last year's "245 passes then back to Tim" has become "150 passes, give it to Deulofeu, Lukaku scores" which is good.
kiss the crest
Player Valuation: £35m
Never mind decking 4th we are 8 points off the top, start believing lads, it's not even Christmas yet
Quite.
degsy likes this-ish, sort of, some bits.
We seem to do first halves ok, then play Russian roulette with the sitting back stuff...why not keep on keeping on with what worked.
not definitive I know, but if a team in the 2nd tier (whatever its called now, I still think of it a the 2nd Div ) just fail to do us 2nd half and the 18th team in the prem can do us, no matter what we do in the first half better teams might be all over us as the game goes on...if we keep with the sitting back that is.
Yep i agree. The 1st goal came due to a sustained period of pressing and getting the ball turned over to us quickly. I understand that can't be sustained for the full match but I thought we were poor 2nd half, in fact it was an exact replica of Bournemouth performance wise. It happens a lot, usually we start off games like that but lately we've been doing quality 1st halves and sloppy 2nd halves.
Delighted to get through though, though as @Eggs mentioned this morning, the team need to realise how potent they are and if they continue to press we will win a lot more games and win them comfortably.
I agree. I also think there has to be a bit of realism to any discussion. That is often hard as we all wanted to throttle the player, the manager and the cat after Saturday!
We have to accept that no game is safe under Martinez. That does have to be traded off against the idea that we can overturn margins to win. Bournemouth is the reverse of West Brom.
You do have to try and avoid judging managers on a game by game basis. He's not the messiah for winning at a championship team, nor is he awful for drawing at Bournemouth.
We are doing ok this season. Moving forward from last season. There's a lot more to be improved yet mind but lets enjoying having Barkley, Stones, Lukaku and Deulofeu and give a little credit to the manager who has helped with their development.
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
Mmmm. I'm not sure if it is unrealistically low. Imo it's spot on as a target for a team just gelling into what we can now justifiably say is a Martinez team (mostly his personnel playing his way). Dont forget how hard it is to get to 60 points. Under Moyes we didn't do it all the time (5 times out of the 11 seasons he had here...and most of those five in the low 60's), and that's when we were generally considered 'best of the rest'.
A final appearance and EL qualification are minimum ambitions rather than targets. As you rightly say, we are up against it financially. Any expectancy each season to hit that criteria for a successful season is unrealistic.
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