starbuy

I only browse this forum these days and haven't logged in for quite some time, but logged in today as VB was instrumental in giving this forum its life and character. A top bloke with a worthy reputation. RIP VB.

I'm sad and disappointed it didn't work out for Karanka. He'll go on to have a good career as a manager but I think he needs to step back and learn a bit from this experience. We don't really know what's been going on behind the scenes but Agnew isn't the man for me and we'd be certainly relegated. I hope we have a solid and sensible person in mind. If it's true that this decision was made weeks ago then I hope that person is already pretty much agreed.

I think we have to think back to the fact that in the Championship we had one of the best squads in the division and the likes of Bamford, Tomlin and Adomah were a*** the best attacking players. We didn't play that much differently to the way we play right now, but because we had the better players overall, we had more of the ball and we were able to create chances. The difference now is that we no longer have the better players, spend a lot more of our time pushed back into our own half, so our style of play, which was never attacking in the first place, means we create even less now and ca

Someone's got that Friday feeling! :P I know! Imagine if I'd typed this up on a Monday! :D

I have us bottom on 27 points going down with Swansea and Sunderland, with Palace surviving in 17th position on 28 points. It's going to be that tight! I honestly can't see where our goals are going to come from. We've got no momentum, no consistency and no clue in the final 3rd. We don't defend from the front any more, our lone striker spends much of his time stood on the half way line and I can only see us grinding out a few draws. We don't play with any intensity, never on the front foot. We pass the ball nicely at times in our own half but seem to get a nose bleed as soon as we get clo

Spot on Humpty, my cousin is a West Ham supporter and the West Ham fans were saying how well the Boro crowd got behind the team, Karanka is talking ***. Those who are saying Boro fans are being over sensitive should look at the players if Attack, Attack, Attack is all it takes to upset them Jesus. Except that this may well be the issue. If the players felt pressured by that chant, which helped them play that way then Karanka is trying to protect his players by deflecting the blame away from them. I don't think it will work and I also feel in agreement that it may have had something to do

Having read Karanka's latest comments on the issue, I'm inclined to agree with him. The atmosphere wasn't "awful" in the usual sense. However, I suspected what he was doing with those comments was protecting his players and borne of frustration at seeing his players so distraught. I watched us play in a certain way for 80 minutes and then stop playing that way. I heard the fans chanting and also felt the frustration in the crowd - it wasn't awful but it was there. Based on his latest comments, so too did the players and there has obviously been dressing room talks that allude to the atmospher

Exactly. If I had to watch Forshaw put another corner straight onto Andy Carroll's head on Saturday I'd have screamed myself ho***. Funnily enough this is one of my biggest frustrations too. Against Liverpool I lost count at around 6 set pieces that Traore won in and around the box (including corners) and yet not one of those set pieces caused Liverpool any problems. A proper set piece specialist would be most beneficial. I once thought Downing could have been that for us but his delivery isn't what it was these days. Was it one of the recent games (West Ham) when I watched him take a set

The last thing we need is the club to make any statement in support of the manager, because then everyone will think he is definitely on the way out. Haha, true. Then we're obviously in trouble!! Damned if we do, damned if we don't. Let's hope the majority of these players don't read social media. Maybe Jese is the most obvious since he doesn't speak English anyway! ;)

The real question is how much of an effect will the past few days of speculation have on players deciding to join us or not? From an outsiders perspective, we've got a manager who allegedly spits his dummy out and walks out when the going gets tough, fans who put too much pressure on the players, unhappy players who want to leave, players in the squad who have been treated really badly and what seems like a manager on his last legs. I say all of this allegedly because most of it is hearsay but has caused enough media traffic to see any potential signing question whether this is a place to be r

It's a fair comment and I agreed with your opinion on Friend on twitter too. De Roon has really come into his own and is currently first choice CM for me. Agreed here too, in fact I said on here yesterday that if I were to replace any of the midfielders at the moment it'd be Forshaw. Clayton is doing his job and doing it reasonably well, De Roons pressing from that kind of number 10 position is really good and often forces mistakes from teams. Forshaw is a bit too neat and tidy for me at the moment, yes he has fantastic passing accuracy and makes a lot of them but how many actually create

I'll have some of what you're having!!

I think 3-5-2 was how we should have turned round the Charlton game. Both our fullbacks were high up the pitch because Charlton didn't commit their wingers forward at all. They relied on the pace of their front 2 to cause us problems. With our fullbacks so high up the pitch it was often 2 v 2, while the gaps we'd like to exploit weren't there because they had 2 banks of 4 sitting deep. Had we switched to 3 centre backs, with wing backs providing the width we could have played 2 up front, Ramirez in a free role behind and still kept the 2 central midfielders. I think this would have nullified

I'm not one to be unnecessarily negative but I think there's one key aspect that needs to be faultless from now on for us to get promoted. We can't afford to carry any more players. In every single game from now on we absolutely must get 100% commitment on the pitch from every single player. I'll be there supporting the team as always, but recent performances have left a sour taste. I can accept that things going on can affect people's performance, but from now on it absolutely has to be 100% drive and commitment from every single player. Anything less and we won't stand a chance - we've bl

Absolutely disgusted right now. Everything Karanka has been blasting his players for was yet again evident today. No togetherness. No passion. No desire. No fight. No show. How many players looked like they weren't even quality enough for league 1 nevermind the Championship? Where was the leadership? Leadbitter poor, Downing anonymous, Rhodes isolated. Fry in too deep. Whatever is wrong within the club is clearly not just down to Karanka. I think we can kiss goodbye to promotion because this team doesn't have the bottle.

Must say as an AK fan that I can't see how you can wipe this under the carpet as if nothings happened .... reluctantly and with regret there can only be one outcome ... thank you AK I think there can be two outcomes. Steve Gibson must decide between manager or player power. If he trusts his manager, then he tells him to get back in and tell the troublesome players who aren't up for it to go home and they can leave at the end of the season. If he doesn't, and he feels that Karanka has overstepped the mark and is no longer the right person for the club, then he let's him go and then decides

Personally, regardless of what happens with Karanka, I hope that Gibson weeds out the players who aren't up for it and tells them they're not playing for the club again. In no other employment can you not perform and not have any consequences. Only in football can you decide okay I don't like the manager so I'll just do nothing for my 30k a week salary until he leaves. I think Karanka is likely to be his own worst enemy in this because he strikes me as the kind of person who can't understand when a player isn't 100% committed. His weakness in my opinion is his ability to relate to those who

I'm going to echo Holloway's comments and say that we fans have a MASSIVE part to play in this run in. We've got to get rid of the groans, support the players and make the opposition shrink into their shell. The team is under incredible pressure. They know they should be winning these games, they know they have to win these games, but I often think we're seeing a team playing within themselves. They're not as free as earlier in the season. Let's get behind them 100% tonight. Let's not allow frustration to creep in because when 20k fans start to get tetchy, the pressure the players already p

I like the Forward thinking nature of Forshaw and think he should be given more of a chance depending on the opposition. But in my opinion Clayton and an on form Leadbitter are the best pairing, especially when we play a good team. I think what's been missing over these last weeks is the intensity and I believe a lot of that comes from Leadbitter and Clayton. They cover a lot of ground to make sure they're always available and to close down the opposition and I just think that both have looked leggy in recent weeks. Clayton will benefit from a couple of games off and hopefully come back fre

After a few days of recovery after the Blackburn game, my thoughts are that the mentality of the squad is the problem right now, not the formation, not the ability of the players, just the mentality. When I think back to games earlier in the season, even the Derby game, I think of a team that had confidence in its ability, a team that mentally had every intention of winning. Not just winning the game, but winning the ball, winning the 50/50s. That team played with swagger, with energy, with focus. Over the past few games I believe all of this has been missing. Against Blackburn I saw the

I can think of only a handful of misses from our strikers so I definitely think we need to be working on improving the number of chances we create, but I think there are 2 aspects to this. Firstly, Rhodes is a different type of target who has a knack for finding the space to score. Secondly, you'd hope that Ramirez is also going to be bringing some additional creativity. I recently looked at chances created in the Championship and despite us being the top rated team overall on this website, for chances created we are 14th in the league. Last season we were much higher in chances created table

Sounds a bit weird. Do you have a link for that pls? In the Gazette today, there are a few comments from Karanka titled "Karanka on Kike's departure".

Anyone read Karanka's comments on the Kike transfer? He says that MFC did everything right and that Eibar also had this same problem last season too. Also says that Kike has a lot of things in his head that are not true. Strange comments!

I agree that I don't think Karanka will change the starting formation. However, I do think he may feel that certain players can fulfill the number 10 role (similar to Vossen) in that they're more of a striker/number 10 than a midfielder/number 10. The idea of the formation we play is that it offers flexibility and the players in the final third are able to interchange, but it also works in different ways depending on the natural instinct of the players in that formation. I spoke to a Spanish friend about Kike Sola recently and he told me that if he's given confidence then he can be very eff

My assumption is that with FFP now being measured over a 3 season period, a lot of our expenditure for these deals is balanced across the 3 years. I'd probably say that ticket revenue is up this season compared to last year, while the cup game at Man U will have given us a decent bit of revenue. But ultimately, I think we're going for it. If we don't get promoted then I suspect we'll have to cash in on some of our assets to keep the books steady. All just speculation, but you can see we're not the only championship club splashing the cash, so this must be a reasonably safe gamble that is