I think we all knew we wouldn't keep continually winning by slim margins. Sometimes it'll go the other way. We need a proper striker to push things in our favour more often, but I highly doubt Venky's will give us what's needed to get a decent one.

True, and my memory is clearly a bit hazy, as we actually didn't start the season off well. From 19th August - October 4th we actually lost 6 out of 8 games. We had a mini-revival between October 7th - 29th November before it totally fell apart. JDT's tenure here really was bizarre from a results perspective.

JDT had a strange time here. I think a lot of sympathy towards him came from Venky's consistently pulling the rug out from under him, and it was understandable for that to be used as mitigation. With that said, we generally seemed to get worse as JDT's ideas became further implemented. He had a fairly strong start but we weren't immediately playing his style of football. We had a weirdly disjointed way of playing which was far from pleasing on the eye, but somehow propelled us to the very top of the division. You have to give him credit for that, as odd as it was. However, once our football started looking nicer, results stopped coming. We collapsed in the second half of his first season - there was a lot of insistence it would get better as the football looked nicer to watch, but it never did. In the summer Venky's continued to torpedo any chances of JDT succeeding with the style he wanted to play - so he offered to resign. Our idiot owners declined this, and decided keeping an unhappy manager in situ whose style clearly didn't suit the majority of the players he had to work with was the better option. Stupidity as usual. With that said, we somehow started off the season in quite good form and it wasn't really until November that the wheels totally came off. It was obvious JDT was not going to change his style (one assumes he was quite happy to get the sack, considering he wanted out in the summer), which seemed like it was being done in spite but perhaps it was just that JDT didn't know how to adapt or genuinely believed he could turn things around with his methods. We'll never know, but it was obvious at that point that a change needed to be made. As always with Venky's, it took them far too long to realise this and if not for the deadline day disaster and JDT's brutal and cutting assessment afterwards, who knows if he actually would have been removed? We were very lucky that Birmingham had sacked exactly the type of manager we needed, that he was still out of work, and that Waggott was seemingly a fan. A rare moment of good fortune for us. Ultimately I liked JDT for his honesty, he did well within the chaotic sphere that is Venkyworld, and I appreciated how he wanted to play football. It was never going to work in the long-term, though, and the end was an inevitability. It's a shame as I think with some backing we could and should have at least got a playoff finish, for the first time since we were relegated from the PL, during JDT's first season. The second season was never going to be a success, though, and JDT should have been let go the moment he made it clear he (understandably) no longer wanted to be the manager of the club.

Eustace came into a difficult situation. We were a divided club in free fall, lacking confidence and momentum. His remit was to keep us in the division and he did it - so whilst it was underwhelming at points and there were disappointing performances, we got over the line and Eustace then had pre-season to try and implement his ideas over a period of time without distraction (beyond the usual Venky's nonsense). So far this season, he's done an incredible job. We're overachieving and highly unlikely at this point to go down - a scenario I was genuinely fearful of before the season started and even during this season. He's the type of manager we've needed for a long time - pragmatic, defensive-minded and a great man manager. He deserves a lot more than he'll get from our owners.

We had a similar situation in L1 with Shrewsbury having an unexpectedly good season and they pushed us until near the end. They didn't go up via the playoffs and since then they've mostly finished between 15th and 19th, with their highest finish since that season being 12th.

Good to see somebody telling the brutal and honest truth, rather than pretending Martin is some kind of footballing visionary ahead of his time. A lot of people said Ipswich would get wrecked this season, but Kieran McKenna has made changes to his philosophy whilst trying to keep the core principles in place. Granted they've only won two games this season, but they haven't been a pushover and haven't had many resounding defeats - other than Man City early in the season, and West Ham away, the majority of their defeats have been by only one or two goals. There's still a good chance they go down, but they're competing and putting up a fight. Southampton are basically already down.

I rarely watch MOTD these days, but I watched it on Oct 26 and was left baffled as the pundits lavished praise upon Russell Martin after bottom of the table, winless Southampton lost again. You'd have thought they were top of the league and winning every match. It was like some kind of cult broadcast. Utterly bizarre and I'm clearly out of touch with the modern game. I thought the point of football was to win matches.

Big Mak is your typical 'cult hero' player. Not the most talented, some obvious flaws in his game, but works hard, charismatic and does genuinely contribute on some level. People often compare him to SG, but we didn't pay £5m for Gueye and he presumably isn't one of our top earners, so expectations between the two will clearly be different. Not saying the fee or wages are SG's fault, for the record - that was solely down to the stupidity of those in charge of recruitment at the time - but nonetheless it does make a difference how how the two are judged, whether fair or not.

Moyes has worked at some wonky clubs structure wise so I'm sure he could handle it, but he might be at a point where he doesn't want to deal with that nonsense anymore. I'd imagine he doesn't have to work if he doesn't want to. If Wolves are serious about wanting to stay up, though, then they'd do what's needed to get him in. Not too many candidates out there otherwise who I look at and think yeah, that would give them a proper chance. You never know though. Sometimes it clicks unexpectedly for certain managers and clubs. Really hoping Russell Martin keeps his job if he survives the season to relegate Southampton. They'll be much less of a threat in the Championship if he's still at the helm.

They obviously needed to remove O'Neil, the recent indiscipline suggests he'd totally lost control of the dressing room and their calender year performance has been awful. Backing him would have been the equivalent of accepting relegation at this point. Moyes would probably be their best bet of pulling themselves out of danger. Apparently OGS is the favourite in the betting, and he was at the Ipswich game... so either 2+2 being out together and getting 5, or the board were already planning to pull the trigger on O'Neil. Would be very classless to have the replacement manager there with the current manager in situ, but nothing would surprise me. If it is OGS, I'm not sure that would end well. No track record of being able to fix the kind of situation Wolves are in.

Certainly wasn't an intentional assist, but I suppose the distinction isn't made between intentional and unintentional! On the other hand he would have been credited with the goal if it'd bounced into the goal off his arse unintentionally, so... it is what it is.

BBC credited him with the assist.

I think you mean his sublime combo dummy-backheel assist 😎

For anyone interested in generative AI for music, Suno AI has taken pretty huge steps since I last used it a few months back. If you download it on your phone it lets you use the new v4 model for a while, although eventually you have to revert to the 3.5 model (both are pretty good though). I'm honestly amazed at how far the technology has come since I last used it. Granted it's better at some genres than others. It seems to do a really good job with rap/hip hop. Pretty good with pop, although it's obvious the training data has a lot of autotuned vocals and that can be annoying. I like the rock/metal songs it creates, but the production and mixing is a bit off. An example of a couple of songs I created below - I provided the lyrics and general song direction (verses, bridges, solos, etc) whilst the AI produced the music, vocals and vocal melodies. On the first one the autotune issue is present at times, whilst on the second one the production/mixing issues are evident. Nonetheless, I imagine someone with a lot more time and software could improve both significantly. I imagine at this early stage most of what it produces is ultimately still pretty formulaic and much like ChatGPT would be increasingly easy to spot if mass produced, I haven't really listened to enough AI generated music to know for sure. I sent some of the stuff I'd made to a friend in the music business, and he was both impressed and horrified by what was possible now with AI. Obviously from the perspective of me - as an individual creating music for personal enjoyment that I'd never pay anybody to create - it doesn't harm anyone, but you could see this kind of AI being used in ways which really gut the industry of various professionals involved in the process. It's especially scary when you consider we're still in the embryonic stages of generative AI as a whole.

In fairness to Big Mak, it's not like he looked wildly out of place pre-Burnley. He seemed to have good attributes as a bit of a bruiser up front, and had some excellent touches, movement and passes, a couple of which led directly to goals. The Burnley sending off seemed to totally derail all of his early momentum, unfortunately, and since then he's really struggled. I don't expect he'll ever be a prolific goalscorer as his shooting technique isn't at the level it needs to be, but he has a lot of other attributes which can help us be effective. If he chips in with the odd goal here or there then great, although it does mean we need to try again when it comes to bringing in someone who can realistically get into double figures on the goalscoring chart. I don't think we have that at the moment and as amazing as the current run of clean sheets has been, we aren't going to be able to win 1-0 every game.