Hale End 1-0 West Brom

Saka has been our most dangerous player, from left back.

Can’t watch on Sky Go for some reason. Anyone with any links?

Whoosh. Pépé.

Pépé special

Pépé 2-0 wonderful strike!

BT are showing it, not Sky John.

Stunning

What a shame that Villarreal didn’t give him that sort of space on Thursday.

Oh balls! And I’ve just called Sky and given them pelters!!

Cheers Brom, got it on now.

I know he’s been our best attacker, and there is an element of hindsight but how might we have fared if we’d just moved Saka to left back when Tierney got injured instead of Xhaka. Arteta’s false 9 in the first leg and then strange 4-1-4-1 formation in the second leg didn’t help us but Saka has been such a threat from full back. Something we just don’t have if Tierney is out.

You could make an argument for improvement in virtually every position in our squad but having a pair of really technically excellent, pacy, attacking high quality full backs would improve us massively. It would give us so much better balance, rare for a top team to have anything but excellent full backs

Watching West Brom tonight makes you wonder how on earth they managed to put 5 past Chelsea.

Another peach of a cross by Saka, following a good quick break.

Never mind a yellow, that elbow in the face should have been a red.

Hopefully it's coming but it is Dein on VAR

*%^@.

Why does Gabriel back off AND then let him inside on his stronger foot???

Would that be David Dein?

You'd think after making that pile on his shares he wouldn't need the work.

Bloody hell, that was close. We need another goal here or we're going to blow it.

Hanging on aren’t we?

We are a bit. Mind you, the way things have been going it's not much of a surprise.

Ceballos off. Crap performance and still couldn’t score in a brothel

We are mostly like a footballing equivalent of painting by numbers.

Still v little sign of Pépé wising up to the ways of the Premiership. He needs to strengthen up. A lot.

Shows the state of the team that we started with a central midfield of a guy who isn’t our player and shouldn’t be our player next year, and a guy we decided (rightly) 2 years ago wasn’t good enough for us and somehow we find him back with us simply as a warm body to fill a gap in the squad.
Add in a gk who allegedly quite fancied moving on, a right back who has never been anywhere close to being a first choice for us, and a left winger who is being paid £200k a week and his form has dropped off a cliff as soon as he joined us.

We are all over the place at the moment.

Ha ha. A Willian goal. From a free kick that he won.

Wow. Willian has scored.

Well, well, well.

Willian finally scores!

Fat Sam not looking impressed.

Sorry; Will, Will, Will.

3 points but not exactly inspiring stuff.

Willian redeems his entire season by relegating Sam Allardyce. Great signing.

The greatest satisfaction from this game is being the team that relegated Fat Sam. The man who prides himself on never having been relegated, he’s been sacked by relegated teams before they actually got relegated. We can rank this one alongside relegating Troy Deeney on the last day of last year.

and we finally win a home game, at last.

Until we get better midfielders I genuinely don’t think we will improve one iota.

Xhaka, El Nenny are just unable to play on the half turn, ceballos can but is useless at everything else.

We need a no8 & no10 and a player who can sit on the bench and cover both positions adequately in case of an injury.

We are unable to increase the tempo of our play because our distribution from midfield is shocking. It’s not a deliberate tactic, no *%^@** would ask a team to play like that.

Soumare’s transfer to Leicester is on, under £30m. Adding him to Ndidi and Tielemans is a hugely strong central midfield absolutely primed for the English league. Physical and pace with technique and ability to play and pass at high tempo.
That trip is a better central midfield than Man U’s as well I’d say. Any one of those 3 would start for us.

We need 2 central midfielders in the summer. Some physicality who can travel with the ball and we somehow need to up the technical ability in the side to help us control games. A fabregas/Cazorla type player. In terms of just basic skill with a football (first touch, control, passing etc) we don’t have anyone remotely close to that level, and we’ve actually got too many players whose basic technique is actually quite lacking.