Tomo

The new back up keeper is low-key crucial to get right next summer as Mendy could be missing upto a month due to ACON. If we end up getting a mess of a keeper it could cost us big time! Re striker, i don't know how realistic our chances would be but If England is on his radar we should give everything to pull Haaland.

Not been this nervous for a game in years, six pointer doesn't do this one justice!

Win would be ideal which will mean we can not play all our first choice team in MD6, that plus being out of the cup would give them two free midweeks. Could be massive in such a season as this.

Last year I wasn't too bothered with finishing top as i didnt really fancy our chances Vs anyone of real note over two legs. This year I really want us to finish top because I believe if we can avoid Bayern we have a huge chance of making the quarters and we desperately need a deep CL run!

Doesn't really change much tbh, we'd have still needed a win in Spain next week to secure top spot or a draw to keep it in our hands even if it ended 1-1.

If Sunday's game follows this pattern I won't live to see the final whistle!

Zlatan is still going strong at nearly 40 so who knows

All hypothetical ofcourse but had we got him when Milan did would he have eclipsed JT?

Excellent first half hour but been really really sloppy since then.

Hopefully we get these sitters out of our system for Sunday. Can't afford to miss any then!

No crowd noise on BT

Bit disappointed James is the one being rested and not Zouma.

https://mobile.twitter.com/AfcNoah14/status/1330916517299544074

I have to disagree with some of the timings of the player declines. Ash gave us the last horrah to help get us that CL but ultimately that was 6/7 games, his decline in week by week performance started after the double season while a lot of fans wanted Ivan replaced by Azpi pretty much from the first few games of Mou's return (the signs were there he wasn't quite what he was despite the title in 2015). Torres was shit before we signed him but i brought him up because he declined due to injury's taking away his physical attributes which is what made him great which was the crux of my concern with Golo. For some reason people thought Torres was a technically gifted player which was a myth, it was his (underrated) strength and burst of pace from a standing/walking start that allowed him to become a top striker, when playing for Spain (where the tactics were more technical based than Rafa's Liverpool) he looked levels and levels below David Villa.

But even with Kante in we were hardly solid, at least with the Jorgi/Kova/Mount midfield we were fluid in attack/build up and creating chances/scoring goals which meant a lot of the time we got away with defensive handicaps. And the three times it killed our momentum was in October/November time when we were on a good run playing great football, all off a sudden Kante was thrown back in and our play declined along with our results. Then in January we had that convincing win against Burnley with the two 8's and the link up play between James/CHO on the right (people may say "only Burnley" but that very team went onto beat both our top four rivals in their next two games) which set up a clear blueprint on how to deal with teams who pack their defense and try to shithouse us, next game against Newcastle (the biggest shithousers in the league) we throw Kante back in, create jack all and get beat. Then just before lockdown we produced our two most complete performances of the season with Gilmour dictating from deep and two of Mount, Ross and Kova higher up, do we try and build on that? No, Kante walses back in, Gilmour is back on the sidelines (then brought back in out of position) and we started playing some utterly boring football. I don't want to keep going back to this because Kante looks back to his best now and I couldn't be happier, but on merit he should absolutely not have been an untouchable last season.

Actually on the contrary, that is how a lot of dominant teams are built. Liverpool in the 70s/80s and Fergie at United sustained their dominance by evolving and demoting/selling players at the right time (for example Fergie selling RVN was apparently the final proof he lost the plot, reality worked out quite differently). Building the team around Kante last season when there were (a) concerns about his fitness, (b) we were performing better without him (how good the Jorgi/Kova/Mount trio was is debatable, that it was more effective than any combination that involved Kante last season wasn't) and (c) the worry of whether he may have been declining would have been criminal, imagine if he had an Essien style decline, what then? We'd have fallen into the exact same trap United did with Rooney (which in my opinion was just as big a factor to their decline as Fergie leaving, if not more so). Kudos to Frank for sussing out he wasn't in decline and working out a way to get him back to his best, but us fans who didn't have the same access to similar data and seeing previous examples of horrendous declines from players who relied on athletic attributes for full effectiveness (Torres, Essien, Ivanovic, Ash, all at similar ages to Kante currently apart from Torres who was even younger) were concerned and rightly so.

It's not really anything to do with FIFA. Kante was really poor last year under any metric, apart from Tottenham away all our best performances came without him in the team and not only that, all our other midfielders looked a better fit for Lampard's system, even Barkley. Bringing Kante back in the fold straight away when he recovered from an injury buggered up our momentum three times. I was genuinely concerned he was going down the Essien route and that his injury's were destroying him and I was even more concerned by Frank's insistence that he played when fit no matter what, it was resembling the LVG at United situation with Rooney where he seemingly had to play no matter what because of name and reputation regardless of cost to results. Thankfully all that is a distant memory and Lampard has managed to get Kante firmly back on form and well and truly find him a spot on this team, but I'm not having the rewriting of history with him last season, all the concerns were very much valid.

Happy place Turf Moor!

Common sense prevails!

Wasn't it changed after the farcical one Newcastle got at Spurs?

And after the Gerrard slip game he swore blind he'd never set up like that....

Also Mane must be closing in on Drogba's all time unbeaten PL run in one stadium (80). He won't get near Essien's all comps record though (thanks to Morata).

Arteta since his arrival he blocked Xhaka's departure while offering Mustafi and Elnenny new deals and has made all three important players again. What would our equivalent's to those 3 be? Probably AC, Drinkwater and Baka, could you even imagine the reaction here had Lampard done the above with them?

If my maths is correct Liverpool are about 13 months away from taking our home record, hopefully Leicester put a stop to it, even if it means Spurs end the weekend in top.

Arsenal are a Leno injury/form drop away from fighting relegation!