EVERTON V BRENTFORD

The Brentford goalie goes up for the corner and he heads it wide.

All over!!!!! 1-0!!!

Blue gazza wrote:

Rotterdam 1985 wrote:

Blue gazza wrote:as no-one else has took it up, i'm gonna have a go

very doubtful of a win here, they are in form, we are in shit
so 2-1 very nervy home win

Thanks. I have banned myself from starting match threads. I think we've lost my last 5.

let's hope i don't go the same way haha

The job is yours mate.

Well fucking played lads.

25 points in the bag. 11 games left. Give me three wins and a couple of draws from the remaining games, that should be enough.

Three wins and a draw from seven games under Dyche - the mid-table form we need to stay up. That run includes Arsenal home and away and the Shite at Anfield.

Every win brings an optimism boost. I think I've now moved from praying to a Lord I don't believe in, to actually believing we can do this now. Not necessarily "will", but "can".

Not a bad days results either in the end, after the Bournemouth result. Leicester and Forest both lost, Leeds dropped points at home. Tighter than a gnat's arse down there now.

Huge 3 points. I genuinely think we are an even shitter team than last season, but maybe, just maybe, we can scrap our way out of this.

Big win. Huge effort from the lads. We need to control the game better when we are leading though- it cost us last week and nearly again this week.

Game of two halves big time. I thought we were decent first half but second half was painful at times. Massive win though

Rotterdam 1985 wrote:Well fucking played lads.

25 points in the bag. 11 games left. Give me three wins and a couple of draws from the remaining games, that should be enough.

Three wins and a draw from seven games under Dyche - the mid-table form we need to stay up. That run includes Arsenal home and away and the Shite at Anfield.

Every win brings an optimism boost. I think I've now moved from praying to a Lord I don't believe in, to actually believing we can do this now. Not necessarily "will", but "can".

Not a bad days results either in the end, after the Bournemouth result. Leicester and Forest both lost, Leeds dropped points at home. Tighter than a gnat's arse down there now.

I was cheesed off that Brighton beat them, but I think you're right that it's a good result for us; Leeds would have earmarked it as one they needed to win, and they didn't.

Goodison_Gringo wrote:Huge 3 points. I genuinely think we are an even shitter team than last season, but maybe, just maybe, we can scrap our way out of this.

To quote the old aphorism about 2 guys running from a bear…. “I don’t have run faster than the bear… i just have to run faster than you…”

This is one of those seasons where 40 points represents mid-table. I think the relegation teams will be around 28-35 pts….

I still have us around 36 points for the season but with at leat three others with fewer points.

Armchair wrote:

Rotterdam 1985 wrote:Well fucking played lads.

25 points in the bag. 11 games left. Give me three wins and a couple of draws from the remaining games, that should be enough.

Three wins and a draw from seven games under Dyche - the mid-table form we need to stay up. That run includes Arsenal home and away and the Shite at Anfield.

Every win brings an optimism boost. I think I've now moved from praying to a Lord I don't believe in, to actually believing we can do this now. Not necessarily "will", but "can".

Not a bad days results either in the end, after the Bournemouth result. Leicester and Forest both lost, Leeds dropped points at home. Tighter than a gnat's arse down there now.

I was cheesed off that Brighton beat them, but I think you're right that it's a good result for us; Leeds would have earmarked it as one they needed to win, and they didn't.

Yeah that's the thing, Brighton are no mugs and battered us, but Leeds would thought about that game exactly the way we thought about Brentford - a must-win at home.

Da Judge wrote:

Goodison_Gringo wrote:Huge 3 points. I genuinely think we are an even shitter team than last season, but maybe, just maybe, we can scrap our way out of this.

To quote the old aphorism about 2 guys running from a bear…. “I don’t have run faster than the bear… i just have to run faster than you…”

This is one of those seasons where 40 points represents mid-table. I think the relegation teams will be around 28-35 pts….

I still have us around 36 points for the season but with at leat three others with fewer points.

Ha ha, love that line.

What's fascinating about this season is that none of the bottom 9 are pulling clear, and it's not obvious which teams are just going to drop away. And there will almost certainly be a couple. But the teams in really dodgy form right now are the teams that looked to be pulling away a few weeks ago, and had a certain number of points banked. Leicester, Forest, Palace. All the teams in what was the bottom 6 a few weeks back are picking up enough points to give them hope. As a result, the bottom of the table is seeing this concertina effect.

Must be fun for Villa fans, watching all this, having made a really good managerial change early enough in the season to coast into comfortable mid-table.

10 points from 7 games for Dyche then. I thought it would be interesting to compare the records over the last seven games for all teams in the relegation scrap.

Palace (12th) - 4 pts. W0, D4, L3, F3 A6
Wolves (13th) - 10 pts. W3, D1, L3, F7 A8
Forest (14th) - 6 pts. W1, D3, L3, F5 A14
Everton (15th) - 10 pts. W3, D1, L3, F5 A10
Leicester (16th) - 7 pts. W2, D1, L4, F11 A13
Bournemouth (17th) - 8 pts. W2 D2 L3, F6 A11
West Ham (18th) - 8 pts. W2, D2, L3, F8 A9
Leeds (19th) - 5 pts. W1, D2, L4, F5 A9
Southampton (20th) - 9 pts. W3, D0, L4, F5 A8

I hope I don't come across as over-optimistic here, this isn't "don't worry, we'll stay up" propaganda. I'm just presenting the case for us having more hope now than probably at any stage of the season. I am cherry-picking by picking the last seven games as the parameter here, and maybe we're benefitting from our new manager bounce. And as M4G pointed out, we've played more games than everyone else.

With all that said, the purpose of these numbers is to demonstrate what I said earlier - that (outside of Leeds) the three teams we hoped would get dragged back into it a few weeks ago - Palace, Forest and Leicester - have taken fewer points than the rest during this period. And also, to stress that point that mid-table form is all we need to survive. 10 points from 7 games averages out at about 54 points for a whole season, so that's better than mid-table form. Just as well we got those 10 points given the upcoming run of games.

One other thing about this - goals scored, which I've put in bold. We're not so different to all the other chaff at the bottom, really. Half of West Ham's 8 were scored in one half of football against Forest. Only Leicester are significantly clear of us in terms of goalscoring, they scored 4 in back-to-back games against Spurs and Villa. Their goals have dried up since, although in fairness they've played United, Arsenal and a resurgent Chelsea during that time.

I recall recently putting a number on what I thought our chances were of staying up. I think I put it as 20 - 30% a couple of weeks ago. I think I'm at about 50% now, even allowing for this horrible run of games coming up.

Rotterdam 1985 wrote:

Blue gazza wrote:

Rotterdam 1985 wrote:

Blue gazza wrote:as no-one else has took it up, i'm gonna have a go

very doubtful of a win here, they are in form, we are in shit
so 2-1 very nervy home win

Thanks. I have banned myself from starting match threads. I think we've lost my last 5.

let's hope i don't go the same way haha

The job is yours mate.

Ref the Gray disallowed goal - this goal for Juventus tonight went to VAR and was allowed to stand. It looks way more definitively handball than Gray's, and Rabiot's reaction was telling.

Maybe, just maybe, VAR thought here that there wasn't definitive evidence to rule it out. Well that most certainly should have happened with the Gray goal.

Fucking bin VAR off. It's a waste of time.

Rotterdam 1985 wrote:Ref the Gray disallowed goal - this goal for Juventus tonight went to VAR and was allowed to stand. It looks way more definitively handball than Gray's, and Rabiot's reaction was telling.

Maybe, just maybe, VAR thought here that there wasn't definitive evidence to rule it out. Well that most certainly should have happened with the Gray goal.

Fucking bin VAR off. It's a waste of time.

https://twitter.com/btsportfootball/status/1635026390880776193

I've watched it a few times now, and I can't believe Gray's goal was ruled out.  There didn't seem to be any angle that showed a clear and obvious error by the ref.  After a couple of looks, I thought it came off his left arm, but above the t-shirt line, so wasn't handball.  Then I thought it came off his chest, and only in the final view did I think it might have been a forward movement by his right arm, but I couldn't tell if he'd touched it  Fucking ridiculous decision.

I heartily concur - fucking bin VAR.

By the way, is anyone else addicted to the OS "Tunnel View" footage?  I love it.  No commentary, just a lovely documentary about the day of the game, and the game itself.  Sometimes you can hear the players' voices, or some of the staff or fans, but mostly it's just the sound of the stadium and the game itself. I look forward to it every time.

hairy cataract wrote:

Rotterdam 1985 wrote:Ref the Gray disallowed goal - this goal for Juventus tonight went to VAR and was allowed to stand. It looks way more definitively handball than Gray's, and Rabiot's reaction was telling.

Maybe, just maybe, VAR thought here that there wasn't definitive evidence to rule it out. Well that most certainly should have happened with the Gray goal.

Fucking bin VAR off. It's a waste of time.

https://twitter.com/btsportfootball/status/1635026390880776193

I've watched it a few times now, and I can't believe Gray's goal was ruled out.  There didn't seem to be any angle that showed a clear and obvious error by the ref.  After a couple of looks, I thought it came off his left arm, but above the t-shirt line, so wasn't handball.  Then I thought it came off his chest, and only in the final view did I think it might have been a forward movement by his right arm, but I couldn't tell if he'd touched it  Fucking ridiculous decision.

I heartily concur - fucking bin VAR.

By the way, is anyone else addicted to the OS "Tunnel View" footage?  I love it.  No commentary, just a lovely documentary about the day of the game, and the game itself.  Sometimes you can hear the players' voices, or some of the staff or fans, but mostly it's just the sound of the stadium and the game itself. I look forward to it every time.

As is often the case, football introduces something new but does it really badly. In rugby you can hear the ref clearly say to the TMO "my decision is a try, can you give me any clear reason not to award the try?" With VAR they seem to actually look for reasons that don't exist to disallow goals. Why would they do that? To actually seek spurious reasons to invalidate what the game is about seems really weird. In cricket you can also hear the conversation from the video umpire. In the NFL the on-field referee gives a full explanation of the video decision. Why not in football, why does everything in football have to be so shady?

Of course, in this Juventus game a VAR explanation in Italian would have been no good to me. So they should be compelled to do it in English, the language of The Beatles and Winston Churchill, given that we invented the game and won the war etc.

And thanks for the reminder, I love the tunnel access vids myself but haven't seen this one yet.