joe_fishfish

No probably about it. Isak is better as well, Ollie Watkins is better. Nic Jackson is widely ridiculed and I'm not sure he's any worse than Darwin. Mateta has outscored him, as has Kai Havertz, as has Hwang. If you were in charge of transfers for a Champions League club in a big league, and you were looking for a striker this summer, would you be looking at Darwin? Or would you be looking at lads like Loic Openda, Marcus Thuram, Victor Boniface, Dusan Vlahovic? You'd probably look at someone like Folarin Balogun before you looked at Darwin.

If we’re keeping Klopp’s no dickheads policy, which I hope we are, that stops us going for Olise.

He was outstanding in Belgium before he went to Chelsea, he was really fucking good at Werder Bremen, then absolutely amazing at Wolfsburg. We should have been all over him like a rash before he went to Wolfsburg, but we were concentrating on not signing Konoplyanka instead.

Yeah it was really not a good sign how he got absolutely dominated by Scamacca. The same Scamacca who looked like a competition winner at West Ham. Konaté wouldn’t be the first player to lose a bit of physicality after a string of injuries.

A good post, in full

There are some Crystal Palace fans who consider themselves "ultras". For that reason alone I hope they fold. Good performance tonight like.

He was really good for Coventry? Mate of mine is a Cov fan, was disappointed that he left

There aren’t

Saw that “increased accuracy” thing around the end of last season too. Guess who measured it? An independent panel? Haha as if. The other thing is that it only measures decisions that were definitely wrong, out of total decisions made. If you give nothing at all, also called “doing an Anthony Taylor”, there’s nothing to compare against, so you’ll look amazing on that measure.

I did some Moneyball style number-crunching this morning while I was supposed to be working (ie. I clicked around on fbref for half an hour) and found this lad - Enzo Barrenechea. 22 year old Argentinian defensive midfielder on loan at Frosinone from Juventus. Incredible on the website. Top numbers for ball recoveries, aerial duels won, and miscontrols (in that he hardly ever miscontrols it). I found exactly one youtube video on him from last year which made him basically look shit, so it looks like the youtube scouts haven't heard of him either, we can steal a march on everyone here. I'm calling it now, if we sign this lad he'll drag us to number 20 on his own.

Why not just sign Mbappe, Rodri, Bellingham and Odegaard while we're at it?

There's no way de Jong leaves Barca before his contract is up, they gave him like 700 grand a week or something. Absolutely insane. He'll never get that anywhere else.

If that’s all true about Amorim’s playing style I think it’s a bit of a shit decision. The stuff about having insane wage demands and a cunt of an agent and using West Ham’s interest to flush out a bid from us, yeah. That should have been enough.

When it turns out to be Lukaku we’ll think back to this tweet and it’ll all become clear.

I’m still hoping they go for Southgate

Xavi is staying at Barca now

City? Paying players off the books? I'm shocked. SHOCKED

Striker and defensive midfielder are the two big glaring holes in the squad. I like Jayden Danns and Stefan Bajcetic a lot but we need top quality first choice players in those positions. After those two it’s just replacements for whoever leaves.

If you have Trent and Davies as your full backs you could have the greatest centre backs in history in the middle and still ship shedloads of goals. Davies makes Trent look like 2001 Jamie Carragher defensively.

Fair points. Hope whatever his plan is, he gets it working quickly.

Agree with all this, it looks like he's the best option from a particularly shite bunch.

Do we have to keep two of them? Fuck's sake.

I can see why we didn't go for Amorim though. I think he would have required a lot more turnover in the squad. Sporting rely loads on extremely fast wing backs and outer centre backs, Geny and St Juste in particular are absolutely rapid. I think he'd have taken one look at Trent's work out of possession and thought, nah, this lad can't play wingback for me. For his ideal squad we'd have needed to sign backup wingbacks as well simply because of the ground they'd cover and the amount of games we play. We'd also have no playing time for many of the centre mids. Szoboszlai, Elliott, Jones, Mac Allister and maybe Trent competing for one spot alongside a proper holding mid, and we probably want to strengthen that holding midfield position as well. Diaz might not have fitted either because the wide players in Amorim's front three are more like number 10s than wingers. So you'd be looking at 8-10 deals to be done for a manager and playing style that might turn out to be useless at Premier League level. Slot seems like a bit less of a gamble in that regard because his playing style is more similar to Klopp's. But the risk for me is that he's even less proven because the Dutch league is fucking garbage. What I've seen of his Feyenoord side, it looks like they rely on quick incisive passing in and around the penalty box, even against teams that defend deep. You can't do that so much in the Premier League, the players are so much bigger and quicker that the spaces Feyenoord typically try and open up often will not exist. Also the talk of his pressing system being man-to-man and extending over the whole pitch doesn't sound good, it doesn't seem to work that well in the Premier League, Leeds conceded shitloads when they played like that under Bielsa. There are so many games in English football, no squad can keep it up for 90 minutes three times a week, not when you're up against extremely physical opponents and shite refs. Even Abu Dhabi, with their infinite money and manager who both loves Bielsa and is no stranger to PEDs, don't play that way. I dunno what the answer is though. I'm sort of pinning my hopes more on Hughes being able to sign the sort of players Edwards was signing in 2017 and 2018 instead of the sort of players we've been signing recently. If we got one or two really fucking excellent first team players in this summer, whoever the manager is will matter a lot less.

To be honest I was quite looking forward to some defensive solidity and hard work out of possession. I love Klopp and all he's done for us but the high risk / high reward style of play has made watching us very stressful. Even earlier in the season when we were on a good run I was barely enjoying the games because we were always one misplaced pass from conceding a goal. As happened at Old Trafford.

There’s been a few mentions of him preferring a man to man pressing scheme rather than the zonal triggers we use at the minute. Atalanta did a proper number on us with that approach but it’s easy to negate. Leeds used it under Bielsa and conceded shitloads.