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Keep this standard of journalism up and there’s no reason why you can’t end up writing at The Athletic! Great piece and had you not mentioned you were an Ipswich fan, you’d pass of as one us! Enjoy the Prem next season, you proved a lot of people (including myself) dead wrong this season!

Well, JDS is under contract for 3 seasons and Bidwell’s expires next year. He’s obviously a solid player and he doesn’t want to be a backup option. The people saying ‘get rid’ of JDS as if it’s an easy task. Even if we let him go for a free, someone needs to pay his wages.

Browne is a leader, agree it would be a fantastic signing. It’s well and good signing players ‘to the model’ but it would be foolish to have no experience around them. We’ve lost/losing all our ‘leaders’ this summer and that’s assuming Sheaf stays. However, I am confused, why does McCallum want...

I believe both Rudoni and Dolan, two mooted targets can play there. Rudoni is a CM/AM and Dolan is a versatile RW/LW/AM. Plan A will be 4-3-3 or 4-4-2 and 4-2-3-1 a Plan B, perhaps?

You’re not going to have a season where we sign no one at all, you always needs new players. Last season was a rebuild because we couldn’t field a starting XI of senior players after all loanees and released players left us. We signed 14 players with 17 leaving. This summer, we need to sign...

Thomas wasn’t signed from L1, he was signed from Burnley who’d just won our league and came through their academy. Plenty of good players come from League 1, I’ll pick out a few examples; Ivan Toney set a goal scoring record straight from L1, McNally for us came from L1, Ipswich have just won...

38 goals says otherwise…

This is what the club does. Ironically, the signings that attract the most negative comments from fans; JDS, Collins, Palmer were brought in on AV’s recommendation. The most subjective analysis, he used to coach them and in some cases, knows the players exceptionally well. See Collins story...

Not enough players… players play more minutes and fatigue accumulates?

Interesting, don’t you think?

There’s that and we defended way better as a team last season. Collins has had a bad end to the season and that’s took the focus away from our defensive effort as a whole. Our defence hasn’t been good enough compared to last season, even when we played 3-4-1-2. We concede too chances as a team...

Definitely on the wind up here 😂 I’ve said many times that I rate him as a solid player who’s a 7/10 consistently. To say we’re weaker in CM with Eccles and Sheaf than Hamer and Sheaf is true on a subjective and objective level. We miss Hamer’s goals and if Eccles wants to step up and do it...

Saying Eccles isn’t as good as Hamer isn’t the same as criticising him. We’ve lost something since Hamer has left and it’s not even worth discussing whether or not that is the case. MR says we need more quality yet from your posts, getting rid of Collins will solve all our issues. Sorry to...

That’s a stat for shot difficulty which measures how easy/difficult the shots have been for the GK and Collins and Allsopp have faced the ‘easiest’ chances. It’s why you measure xG as well. The premise of this stat that of all the shots a GK has had to face, how goals should they have conceded...

How do you get that from those stats? 😂 That is textbook, reading whatever you want from a statistic. MR has mentioned it enough times that our defending hasn’t been good enough, giving up 9 shots in the box against Ipswich is not all Collins fault. Our defending last season was so much better...

How would you measure performance, if not statistics? Performance athletes need objective markers of good performance. What does physical presence even mean to you and specifically, how do you measure it?

That’s why save % is also covered as well as PSxG. His April stats l would almost definitely be a lot worse and the pertinent point here is that he really hasn’t been as bad as some have claimed this season. ‘Command of box’ gets mentioned a lot, the best keeper for this category will stop...

£2m in the kitty? Get in.

The club has a 5 year plan and in the next 5 seasons, the expectation is to make the playoffs 3 of those seasons. We were in the playoff race more or less till the end. Objectively, it was a success because we met expectations. There’s a worrying trend of how teams who lose the playoff final...

That’s not what the stats are saying at all and you know it. Shows how much you read because it’s out of 31 GKs, not 20 and Ramsdale is ranked 19/31 and Raya is ranked 21st. The GKs playing for mid table / lower table teams are always over represented partly because they face more shots than...