MAN THE BARRICADES! (A Match thread)

Personally for me style and messaging is intrinsic to content. Dyche tells me practical things that I know improve football teams. Ange never told me that. He told me how people were wrong about him, and how it's all unfair (presumably we are to ignore the league record and evidence of our eyes). He told me that he was a thing (the dreaded philosophy), and that sticking with the magic smoke and mirrors would eventually drop success out of the sky.

It's not football management with a lot of these bellends. Its a fucking cult.

The positive is that we actually look like we are playing okay now, apart from the conceding from set pieces thing. And of those two concessions, one wasn't a corner, the other could easily have been ruled out for offside interfering if we had the consistent attritional referee bias of an in form manure.

A draw wasn't a disaster and our form was decent. Yes we need to grind out results, but we have the right staff in place to do the job.... And enough functional players to get it done.... Barring key injury.

Hopefully getting Aina and wood back will help the second half of the season....a couple will be more fully acclimatised (Ndoye and Jesus), Medium 'T' can be turned into the player that he can be, and that we retain enough collateral in Mcstarskew and hutch to part chop them for a decent midfielder.

We'll be reet. I think we'll get over thirty five points from here (28 games?).

We were the better team without the ball today (apart from the corner thing). That's a recent development.

I agree with this. It's exactly the sort of thing that you need to take on the chin. Pretty much every footballer who has ever played the game is claiming that as out, and almost all would genuinely think that it was (wrongly).

But that doesn't undermine the frustrating "just defend the corner" narrative that is the normal second stage argument. What are the stats on goals conceded from your own goal kick, versus those conceded from a corner? The notion that "just defend the corner properly" is some sort of magic bullet to prevent goals from set pieces happening is infuriating.