yeah, price point and career trajectory. a bit weird that in the defensive areas we have bought the best up and coming talent but in the forward areas we have bought…like, literally Willian.

right, and overall basically all the good signings we’ve made have been early 20s rather than old. and you’d expect that to be more so in the forward areas.

this is the major issue imo yeah.

I agree with this, he was great and then he wasn’t. overall it comes out somewhere in the middle, but he was a critical part of getting us from there to here.

yep, agree.

read a piece of research once that signing success rate (judged by utilisation) is about 50%, is a coin toss. so this is probably fairly normal. of course ideally you want to be better than normal, as indeed we have been recruiting other positions.

yes I think I probably agree, although we have too many awful ones. the issue is maybe more that our signings in midfield and defence and goal have been exemplary and that has set expectations.

Ok, ok, awful, awful, great, great, good, bad, great, awful.

giving us an overall average of 3 Flans out of 5 🍮 🍮 🍮

verdict: ok.

the neutrals should be thanking us for making the run in interesting. where are the punditocracy pieces on our selfless sacrifice to the greater good of the game?

Havertz was excellent yesterday, bears absolutely no criticism.

then he’s stupid.

I suspect we are stuck with him for a while; I just hope that doesn’t stop us signing someone else.

I really hope we don’t sell those two. although I think MLS was in the outtray from the moment Hincapie signed.

agree on all counts.

agree. think whatever we you cut it he was the wrong guy, but it might look better if he wasn’t a single point of failure.

aye. sometimes things just reach a conclusion. my sense is we aren’t there yet, but who really knows.

I agree, I agree. just, y’know, reasonable people may differ.

sure, and fair enough—although I don’t really agree with that either. it is perfectly possible that Mikel has just taken us as far as he can. (not saying I subscribe to that view, but I think it’s valid enough. Berta was here when we collapsed 2 and 3 seasons ago.)

(of course many things can go very badly in that timeframe, so I’m not saying let’s not have opinions or whatever. just that we are shooting in the dark a bit here.)

I don’t mean this to be too much of a defence of that business (as I said at the time, there were a couple I wouldn’t have chosen), but I think they’ve all broadly done what they were brought in for. and whether Berta is good or not is a 3+ year question.

it’s also just too early for the obituaries. if we were to win the CL (and I think we are still favourites, although I appreciate that’s partly a conceit of the odds given the other semi finalists playing each other) then it’ll be because we had a broad and deep squad able to compete.

the sixth is a millstone and it’s a transfer we got badly wrong—but we did need a CF, he’s scored 18 goals, and he wasn’t that expensive.

not to pick on Aaron, but I see a lot of this and I think it’s unfair, or at least premature. we went toe to toe with City today and we had five of our summer signings starting.

…and I’m not sure we will.

did they? oh great.

yeah.

no, and they’ll also have their focus on the Europa League (Emery’s natural home).

same w/ Palace—they’ll be more focussed on Europe and won’t have anything to play for in the league.

looking at the remaining fixtures and I’m not sure I see City dropping any points, but it’s maybe handy that they play all of Everton, Brentford, and Bournemouth, all of whom are in the running for that last European place.

they’ve also got Villa, but Villa are safely in the CL now.

brother I don’t even have a towel

I am so gutted. just really, really sad. Manchester City have loads of titles, they don’t need this like I do.