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.

I think someone on here said that 3 at the back seems to have helped us stop being so easily counter attacked. I couldn't really see that as in all the games so far, we have been caught stone cold on the counter attack in every game. The problem is clearly how quickly we empty out the midfield. There is a total lack of discipline on the pitch so formation changes are not going to have a great deal of impact if we cannot do the basics. Referring more to Stoke and Leicester (which I watched), we conceded goals because we gave the ball away and we were very quickly outnumbered in the final third. I can only assume that yesterday was more of the same?

I see Ramsey getting lots of **** but Xhaka loses his position very easily as well. He was brilliant in the cup final and did everything correctly but seems to have gone back to the indiscipline he showed far too frequently last season. If Ramsey is going to go forward, Xhaka must stay put. This is what does not seem to be happening. Of course there are serious question marks about why Ramsey is bombing forward at Liverpool at 0-0 when we are struggling to get a foothold in the game?