Quote Originally Posted by SWv2 View Post
The perseverance with an out of position Chamberlain, and the enforced resultant knock-on across the defence is just baffling.

He has allegedly said he does not want to stay and continue to play for the club, whatever about his professional attitude to his last 12 months but that is the crux of it. He is not such a good player – as one could argue with the other two – as to continue this stance of playing him in the hope that he suddenly thinks differently, which surely is what is happening.

You buy two assets to strengthen your team, both of whom have started their careers very promisingly, and then you leave them out for the first major top 6 clash – having hooked both of them last week when things were going wrong at Stoke. They weren’t even going that wrong, we just contrived to fúck up a game we should have won.

The midfield. Now forget individual opinions on the qualities or otherwise of the two players, but at some point you have to ask what managerial tactical instruction they are being given. Ramsey doesn’t just decide on his own will to charge into the most forward position in the team so early in matches, if he does he is told to stop, if he does not do so the manager acts. Bringing Coquelin from the bench is not the answer either, he is not good enough, he would not make the starting 11 of any side we are allegedly in competition with.

Ramsey is (correctly) getting abuse for having his back to play when the move for the first goal developed. He was talking to the bench. Now I assume he wasn’t asking for opinions on the finale of GOT so what was going on, tactical instructions, injury … whatever it was who on the bench thought it appropriate to have that chat as play went on behind them. Meanwhile Chamberlain was just walking away, in his own world.

It was a fúcking shambles really. Maybe not the worst in my ever but certainly the worst I can recall. Very good footballers looking like pub players, not one bar Cech has a shred of credit.

And now I expect we will sell our 35m German international defender in the next few days, the player we spent weeks chasing only 12 months ago.

I just don’t get it.
We will sell him and Chamberlain and get maybe £60m back. If we don't sign anyone this week (not that it will make a difference but we need a CB and CM) then we are well and truly ****ed. We'll probably end up with Draxler or Mahrez as a "make everyone happy for a week" panic buy.