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'Perhaps not the best football game' - quite! Looks tired, beaten down, and out of ideas. Has he taken this squad as far as he can? Whether we sink or not, I guess he'll be weighing up his options, and no doubt the club will be too.
Looking to the fans for the 'extra mile, extra energy'! As if we/they haven't given it up in spades already!
Would prefer it if he put the boot on the other foot and said we and the team really owe the fans, but that wouldn't be modern football, would it? (Accountability, respect, and other such quaint sporting values.)
Field's return gives us some ballast at least, hopefully.
Wake me up before we go-go (or maybe when we've gone-gone), Marti!
'I would have made 11 (half-time substitutions) if I could have done it, I was not happy and this is on me. I think that some of the players who came from the bench helped us to get a little bit better, but the start was not very high.'
I'm certainly no Paal hater, and I appreciate it's not his first language, but honestly - he doesn't seem the brightest tool in the box, does he? His interview's only 3 minutes long, but I didn't even make it to the end. Come on, Ken, throw us a bone, man! I'm not asking for Brian Glanville levels of sporting analysis, but is 'taking it game by game' really the best you can do? Today was one game, and your team mates didn't show up, so that cliche isn't even very relevant, is it, if you think about it?
This tendency of our players, and sometimes our manager, seeming to have no idea about why we perform so badly when we do worries me. Wouldn't you think, for your own professional self-respect if nothing else, you'd try to think of something to say before going in front of a camera? It was the same with Field after Swansea, if memory serves. Absolutely shocking first half in particular, but, again, he didn't have a clue as to why.
I must be missing something! These are professionally coached players. Is it they just don't think about their team and what they're doing, or they don't really care?
Well, LH thinks he's the bees knees as it turns out, so I guess if you're one of those unfathomable fans who like/d Lee, that should presumably give a shot in the arm to your esteem for Christian. (Conversely, on the principle that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend', in my case, if Hoos hated him, I'd think Nourry couldn't be all bad.)
As China Crisis once put it in their prophetic paean to CN 'Christian':
'This is emotion Emotion less war A torn shirt and a long dead cause I can't sleep This kind of thing gets me down Don't say walk I may lose my fear'
On Clive Allen's prodigious goal v West Ham, 1984 Rob Smyth, Guardian, 4/2/20
'Allen, like all great goalscorers, spent his career trying to find space. That generally involved running on to the ball rather than trying to manufacture it while in possession. But he did a nice sideline in goals that involved the sort of imagination and spatial awareness associated with hipster darlings. Bergkamp or Dimitar Berbatov would have [...] loved the one at Upton Park.
It started with the mundane act of stretching away from goal to control Mike Fillery’s cross, while trying to keep his balance on the muddy surface. Allen turned just outside the D and stopped to front up Billy Bonds, the West Ham captain. Bonds was leaning towards him like a sumo wrestler, waiting for the signal to engage. Their brief stand-off was interrupted when Neil Orr, appearing to Allen’s right, decided to stick his surname in. As he approached, Allen dragged his studs over the ball to move it slightly away from goal, thus partially shielding it from Orr and buying himself a split-second to work out what to do next.
Allen’s instinct told him to drag the ball again, this time to move it completely away from Orr. As he did so, Bonds saw his chance and lunged optimistically towards the ball. Before he got there, Allen produced a third drag-back to take him out of the game. Orr, meanwhile, was transfixed just outside the area, engaging in a ferocious internal debate as to what day it was.
“After the second drag-back I still had my back to goal, so I had to move it again,” says Allen. “That’s why I did another drag-back. Each touch led to the next one.”
One at a time. It’s the footballer’s cliche, usually used for taking each game as it comes. But most individual goals are created one step – or, in Allen’s case, one drag-back – at a time. There’s no bigger picture, no bird’s-eye view or medium-term planning. It’s like an arcade adventure game, where your only concern is to avoid being zapped by the nearest defender.
For all Allen’s eye-catching drag-backs, the best touch might be the one that followed, an instant push into the space in front of goal. “The ball actually got away from me a little,” he says, “and I had to stretch to finish it.”
The weight of the touch was less important than the angle. Had it been any straighter, Alvin Martin would have been able to beat Allen to the loose ball. Instead he arrived a split-second after the striker, who guided the ball past Phil Parkes and into the bottom corner.
The finish was admirably clear-headed; most of us would have been so high on our own skill as to over-excitedly leather it into Row Q. It was a goal of unique brilliance, a Zorroish swish through the West Ham defence, and even more striking in the context of 1980s English football. It belonged on the Copacabana.'
I'm still creaming over Koki's supernatural leap over Callum the Elder for Chair's second goal. He's 5'7; Elder is 5'11 - I did my research, people! - but Saito must have risen a foot above him to win that header. The goal, as a whole, was a thing of utter teamworked beauty. Perhaps they should put him up against Callum the Younger next time?
This smiley, skilful, uberrespectful guy is going for big, big money one day, but I hope with all the contents of my Pandora's Box we can hold onto him for as long as possible.
I also think Edwards is going to get better and better. If we could somehow sign him for next season, that would be massive for us.
It's all we want as fans, isn't it? To hope and dream, and look up at the stars?
The top 4 seem to over the hill and far away in some combo or other, but it looks like it could be lowish, with Blackburn sitting in at 5th, 4 points ahead of us with 12 defeats. We have 13 games left, for which I could foresee a return of 7W, 3D, and 3L at best, which would give us a 68 point finish.
What's been the lowest points tally to sneak into the playoffs, does anyone know?
And what's realistic/heartfelt (delete according to personality type)?
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