CHOULO19

Nope. He was actually being serious!

'Arry and Jamie feeling bitter and annoyed.,,,every time you think Munich couldn't get better, it somehow does!

How the hell do you learn swimming using YouTube videos?! I had an instructor and I still couldn't learn!

Thibaut and Cech are both excellent keepers. The difference is that Cech is our "Get out of jail free" card now, while Courtois, may not be that good at the moment, can be our keeper for more than 10 years. So it's never going to be an easy decision. It's a choice between short-term success and long term-success.

This is an old one: A biology teacher asks her elementary class: "What human body organ can reach up to seven times it's original size when stimulated?" At which a girl in the class gasps and, shocked, tells the teacher that she should not be saying stuff like that to kids their age. The teacher does not answer the little girl but instead just repeats the question: "What human body organ can reach up to seven times it's original size when stimulated?" The girl, feeling more indignant, stands up and yells at the teacher: "I'm telling my parents about this!" At this point, a boy raises his hand and, after a nod from the teacher, says: "The eye pupil?" Teacher: "Correct" Teacher, now addressing the little girl: "First of all, you obviously didn't study your lessons at home, secondly I'm going to have a talk with your parents about your dirty little mind, and finally, I'm afraid to tell you that one day you're going to be very disappointed!"

Plenty of defensive faults that get overlooked. Just go watch their game against Cardiff this season where Bellamy made a fool of him all game. Yet, he still got MOTM even though he was probably one of Everton's worst men on the pitch. That's what I mean by grossly overrated by the media.

Baines is an excellent LB who is currently probably better than Cole, but he's been grossly overrated by the media; he is no where near world-class like Cole was up till 2010.

Why? Do you usually use biology or history in your everyday life?

I want one of those!

Nonsense. The return of Jose agreed months before it was announced.

Right now I hate the international break because it broke the momentum that we've built over the past couple of weeks which we could have really used going into the next few matches.

Alright ladies, is there a point to all this? Let it go, please...

That is exactly the point I was trying to make originally: If we had a 20+ league goals per season striker, we won't be playing the current system and our midfield won't be scoring as many goals as now since less chances will be falling their way and more to the striker. So even though we'd change the system, it doesn't necessarily mean that the team as whole will score much more goals. I don't want to go into debate on whether or not we would actually change the system because it is purely hypothetical, but we've made around 200m investment between fees and wages in the attacking midfielders our system is currently built around. I'm not too sure we would just change the system that easily. Swindon? Steaua? Those are league one level defenses that we'll barely a few times a season. I'm talking about the level of defenses that we would face on a regular basis. Plus Eto'o must have taken about 5-6 shots from distance against Steaua. So the 17 chances are by no means all clear-cut chances. The point is we are not creating enough chances for our strikers to expect them to score in every game. To compare, United, despite struggling in creating chances, have created 42 chances for their strikers this season in the league while Liverpool have created 20 chances for Sturridge alone.

You're completely taking the attacking system out of the equation. You're assuming that strikers will perform the same no matter what the system is which is just ridiculous. Falcao had a whole system built around him. The other ten players on the pitch were just trying to get Falcao to score when Athletico had the ball. He had something like 60%(EDIT: 52% to be precise) of his team's goals by himself! Same for RVP last season, while our strikers role last season and to some extent this season is to create space for the AMs to run into. This season, in the league, only 17 of the 79 chances created by us have fallen to either Torres, Eto'o or Ba. That's 21%! So no, the majority of the chances are not falling to our strikers. Falcao had a conversion rate of 22% last season. Cavani had 18%. That means that you would need to create 5-6 chances for them per game if you want them to score every game. There is absolutely no chance we could do that with our current system that is built around the three players behind the striker.

Iain Dowie just said that Heskey had "blistering pace"

That's the fun part!

I'm not saying that the strikers are not getting any chances, but they're not getting the majority of the chances like they do in teams like United or Everton (except against Norwich). Yes getting better strikers will increase our overall goals but not by much. No striker in the world will score every match if he only gets 1-2 half chances.

I'm not disagreeing with any of that (mind you I'm not agreeing with it all either), but it's kinda besides the original point which was that we are currently creating a certain amount of chances per game which won't be affected too much even if we had someone like Gomez leading our line. If you want a striker who scores every match you'll need to change the system and make most of the chances fall to him instead of falling to the AMs as is the case atm.

Nice! Sounds like a lot of fun. So Southampton currently have it? So united can regain their title, not that they have any chance of beating Southampton atm.

Done.

No, only admins can edit the articles on the main site. What do you want to edit? PS: Great post!

Ashley and Frank again with the least number of contributions. And if I understood you correctly, then all 8 of Frank's contributions were in transition and therefor none in defense? Scary if true. Can you send this to Jose, please? I find this point self-contradictory. You just that he was able to do the transition because he was not marked, why would you want him to move to DM where he will surely be marked? A minor note on the pivot or our pressing in general, on several occasions Frank and Rami tried to press high up the pitch when the front four lose the ball but failed miserably at it and our back four suddenly had 5-6 players running at them. Even when Norwich were in "set-offense" and we had 9 men behind the ball, Norwich always managed to create something when they got the ball centrally in our half because both Frank and Rami were too easily atracted to the ball leaving spaces in "the hole" behind them. In general, our pressing was off, I felt, in this match. Even Cole was too keen to press in numerous occasions in the first half and got beaten by the ball over his head which put the whole defense and JT in particular in trouble.

Yeah, Iniesta is the player that would fit most outside Barcelona because he has the ability to play in any system. His attributes are important in any team.

He's expected to be back for Cardiff, but it's not 100%.

I like his attitude but I'm not sure where he'll get playing time when Cahil can barely get a game.