David Kelly

Nope, and then you see Rashford and Anthony looking better as soon as they leave.

I'm not convinced by Amorim at all. He managed to find a set up that worked for Lisbon but the more I see of his Manchester team, the more I think that must have been luck. He comes across as a decent enough bloke but he seems to have absolutely no idea of how to stop the the rot at Manure. He's stubbornly sticking to a formation that he clearly doesn't have the players to make function. I appreciate he was brought in to try and replicate what he did at Lisbon but what he's doing now can only be effecting them negatively. Will the players he has there who should be of a decent quality, ever have any faith in him when what he's doing this season is basically making them look like fools. Surely a good manager would have recognised that he didn't have the tools to do what he wanted this season so come up with a plan to get the best out of what he had until he could reshape the squad to one capable of playing his way. The way they are playing now, you would have to say that they would be in a very real relegation battle had the bottom three not been so bad. They're only three points ahead of forth bottom West Ham! If I was the owner of them I'd be very concerned that what he's doing with that team is significantly reducing the value of the players they will be wanting to move on in the summer to help finance another rebuild. Not far behind my big hope that we get top five this season is the hope that they get knocked out of the Europa League so they finally finish a season with what they deserve. Absolutely nothing. No trophy and no European football. If that happens anything more than mediocrity for the foreseeable looks well beyond them and Big Andy and the like will have to get used to taking beatings from better run clubs like Brighton and Bournemouth.

Tino's crossing seems to be much better with his left foot bizarrely. Can think of three goals in the last four games that have come from his crosses whereas he was very poor in his delivery from rightback. He's always looked a better leftback for us than rightback imo. Tripps has been excellent since he came back into the team as well.

That's not actually true. I assume you're basing it on what was shown last night but that was since December I think. Over the season as a whole there are more players who have more involvements than him (Haaland, Palmer, Wood, Mbeumo to name a few). But your point certainly remains valid as sixteen in the league is good numbers and especially when you consider he had ten league goal involvements in 21 games last season as well (although I can't fully get behind the assist stat as you could tap a two yard pass to someone who then smashes one in from forty yards and get that classed as an assist). I've never been Murphy's biggest fan, I still think he's very limited when he has to think, but he seems such a great lad that you have to be happy for him and it's impossible to argue with the numbers he's putting up at the moment to go along with the graft he's always put in. I still believe we will be looking to replace him, but it's clearly no the easy job that it looked like a few year ago.

I had my hopes on Jimmy Nail doing Big River and Ain't no Doubt. Maybe Ant and Dec will do Let's Get Ready To Rumble?

Decent apart from that god awful accent and the fact that they showed themselves up when talking about the 'Saudi money'. They clearly couldn't care one bit about where the money came from, they were just pissed off that we (and Forest) had money to spend like they had been able to for years because of Littlewoods. I

Wasn't last night in effect the same match (ie the one before the cup final) where Pope got sent off trying to do the same thing against Liverpool and ball dying in front of him and him handling it? I certainly had flashbacks of that watching it last night. Pope is without any doubt better at sweeping than Dubs.

In general I agree, but in that instance we'd fucked about with it so much, if we'd Allison in goal he'd still have had the fuck pressed out of him.

Bruno's post match interview has inspired me so I'm going to say PSG break the legs of Salah, VVD and Gravenberch tonight and we win when Pope saves the final penalty in the shootout from Trent.

To be fair to Pope, that freekick was an absolute abortion well before it got to him. And when it did he was immediately being pressured. He didn't do great with it but you have to look at the players in front of him making ridiculous decisions and poor passes first.

Apparently it's from a knock he took against Spurs which they didn't think was anything at the time. What I do know is that my mates son was in hospital the other week after doing his acl and the nurse there told them that Botman was in getting a scan that day and had been coming in every other day for them. They all thought it was just precautionary at the time.

If the latest rumours are true, it might be at Centre Forward.

I don't think we've ever conceded a goal because of Popes bad kicking and I don't see any concerns from the defence in using him (if anything I think they should show more concern instead of giving him unnecessary balls to deal with when they know he's not comfortable) but I would say Dubravka allows us to retain the ball better and move out from the back more successfully (although I think Pope actually started off two of the goals on Sunday with his distribution with the ball in his hands). Ultimately though I agree, Dubravka has been good enough and didn't need to be dropped. I would have agreed with bringing Pope back in if it was the 22/23 Pope, but the 24/25 Pope isn't playing to that standard. Confidence is perhaps more important for keepers than any other position and I don't think Pope has a great deal of it at the moment.

Oh and Dubravka knows what it takes to win a league cup final so that's another tick for him.

I think it's incredibly harsh to attach any sort of blame to Pope for the first goal last night, it went through two players legs, deflecting off the second. I think he may well have saved it a couple of seasons ago before his injury when he was on top form, but it certainly wasn't a mistake and I don't think I'm backing Dubravka to save it. Before his injury he was undoubtedly the better keeper which is why I think Howe still has him as number one and why I think he will be playing the rest of the season. That said, his form this season has been markedly worse than it was before his injury and Dubravka has stepped up from last season when he couldn't seem to save anything. I still don't think he's been outstanding, he kept clean sheets largely in games when the defence in front of him was superb or we blitzed teams and they got nowhere near scoring. But Dubravka is clearly playing better at this moment and I don't see how it benefits us to have Pope in ahead of him. Apart from anything else, the crowd reaction is doing him no favours.

Genuinely saddened by this. Just watched two of his lesser known gems, Night Moves and Twilight (not the vampire bollocks) and I don't think I've seen a film with him in where he wasn't outstanding. RIP.

Won't this just result in Joelinton being suspended for the final?

I have no problem with it but I suppose there will be supporters who have tried and been unable to get tickets for games that are pissed off that they have no chance real to getting to the final.

How many season ticket holders do we have now? You have to be one down to pot 5 but apparently only the first 3 pots are all guaranteed tickets. I suspect there will be a lot of people unhappy with the way they have split this, but I guess that would be the case regardless of how they split it.

The Kelly money won't (for the most part at least) hit until the summer so it's not a massive surprise.

I'd like to think so. I can't see us going for many mega money deals so being in a position to sign players relatively cheaply would make perfect sense.

I'm still not convinced it's quite that straightforward. I understand where those figures come from, but I get the impression it's not quite as easy as that.

And then still didn't use him (yes I know injuries played their part there). I think it was obvious to most that he was never going to be a player who could move forward with us so it was a strange signing. Wood is the only similar signing we made to Targett but we manage to move him on quickly. Every other signing we have made up to last summer have been with a much longer term view.

That approach is what has resulted in Targett still being here. Although we had the opportunity to send him back to Villa the first summer and bizarrely didn't take it.

Depends on how much you want to keep the supporters happy. There's already rumblings that the Saudi's have lost interest and leaks to the media about the ground redevelopment/new ground and training ground are all just smoke screens. Personally don't believe this is true but I can understand why others are thinking that way. The general lack of understanding of PSR isn't helping at all. I've heard lots of people say that selling Kelly for £20m immediately gives us £100m to spend in the summer but I'm pretty sure it's nowhere near that simplistic. I agree with toonotl that it's a difficult position as we can't just come out and lay our position wide open for all of our competitors to see, but I think some communication is needed. Howe is the only person we've heard from for ages and it's not his job to deal with this. I don't think it's a case of explaining why we didn't spend, but I think some communication would be beneficial.