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Reply | Madsen
at 18:25 21 Jan 2026
I think Serie A is a great shout. He's probably not fast/athletic enough for the PL, but he'd do well over there. |
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Reply | Madsen
at 18:02 21 Jan 2026
Losing Madsen for any length of time is our single biggest risk currently. Not because he's necessarily better than Dunne or Burrell or others, but because we don't seem to have anybody in the squad who can do anything like what he does. I think Jimmy has been brilliant, but I'd feel ok about Edwards/Cook for a run of games, and Mbengue and Field can fill in for a game or two without the defence going to bits if needed. Who replaces Madsen? We saw Field/Hayden tried and the ball just never went fowards, and Varane is less progressive than either. Vale or Morgan might do it but both had pretty lousy goes in their (admittedly short) cameos there recently. |
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Reply | Player Sales
at 16:08 21 Jan 2026
Can't imagine that Dunne is going anywhere. Turns 29 early next season and just signed a long contract here. A team would have to REALLY want him, and given Cook is unlikely to be here that would leave us with only Edwards and Morrison (and the ghost of JCS) as senior CBs so we'd have to find a replacement of our own. |
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Reply | The 3 sides of a match thread at Oxford
at 15:54 21 Jan 2026
Was honestly laughable watching Madsen try and take the one corner where the very instant he stopped holding the ball in place it would blow out of position again. I thought the ref was about to book him for timewasting at one point because it went on so long, with very little he could do about it. |
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Reply | The 3 sides of a match thread at Oxford
at 14:11 21 Jan 2026
Yeah I think that's fair. My pushback is that some of the narrative right now is a little too doom and gloom - I agree we've had a rough Christmas and some poor performances, but across 18 games remaining we'd have to be in relegation form to finish at or below last season, and for the first time in years we seem to be avoiding those doom spirals. Not saying it won't happen, but I feel more confident than I have for a long time that we'll turn a corner, pick up some results, and maintain about where we are or a little better. Win 4, lose 4, draw the rest - a pretty dismal run of form, a sub-25% win rate, we'd still end up on 62. You'd want better, but on the raw numbers it's still forward progress.
The selling thing I think is a bigger issue. We've got lots of exciting prospects who are probably 1-2 seasons away from attracting real money, we've got some solid pros who form the spine you build those prospects around, but in the middle of that you ought to have the players who are ready to sell now for money to go back into the side, and the only one of those that is in any way likely now is Madsen. Celar and JCS we'll get no meaningful return for, Varane has had a pretty poor season, everyone else is on the wrong side of the "development" equation in one way or another. It pretty much has to be Nico, but how much will we really get for him, and how do we replace him? Otherwise maybe Mbengue, or Kolli, but will either of those attract meaningful bids? |
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Reply | The 3 sides of a match thread at Oxford
at 11:32 21 Jan 2026
My counterpoint would be - yes we had a decent run in the back half of 2023/24, but we still finished that season 18th and on 56pts. We're already on 40 with 18 games left to play. If we finish the season in the top half (even if that's 11th or 12th) and somewhere around 65pts (which would be a pretty middle of the road, win one, lose one, draw one type run of form), is that not progress/development? The last three seasons we've spent most of our time looking down the table, and in both 2022/23 and 2023/24 were in real danger of going down. If we end this season having had a couple of flirts with the play-off places, with not a single worry about getting relegated, a bunch of development prospects bedded in with a full season's experience, our best overall finish since 2021/22 - I think I'd take that. No, we can't settle for that forever, but it's concrete, material progress. There's holes in our squad still (left back where we're borrowing a lad who in his supposed athletic prime can't play 3 games a week, centre mid where our entire plan is for Nico Madsen to play every minute of every game because nobody else can play a decent pass, and that plan only looks remotely adequate now because Madsen is an entirely different player than he was six months ago), but in most positions we have vastly more depth than we have for ages.
Some of this stuff is only going to end up being proved in hindsight. Remember when Sunderland came up, loads of exciting kids, not enough steel, had a pretty mediocre season then followed it up on the next go around by winning the playoffs? This could be our version of their 2023/24, getting the squad in place, getting them a year of being kicked about by Championship defenders so they toughen up for next time, going on to better things. Or it could be another false start like 2024/25. Plenty of those in the Championship, not just for us - look at Bristol City, who constantly threaten to make a real stride forwards and don't, or Blackburn just barely missing the playoffs last year and now in severe danger of exiting the other way. If we're here in 12 months raving about our playoff push this season will look like a brilliant foundational step; if we're hanging around the lower half of the table again because we've sold our best players for The Model and replaced them with more kids, we'll talk about it as a missed opportunity. In the meantime, if we're not winning then at least we're not losing, which we absolutely would have been in recent seasons. |
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Reply | Cat 1. Academy Plans
at 13:56 14 Jan 2026
Yeah, I think the WLS article is key here as it suggests the facilities are fit for purpose, it's all the jobs you need that we don't currently have.
I wonder if a big part of it was that we were already employing a lot of people in academy roles which didn't map to the cat 1 requirements, and couldn't/didn't want to bring in further people who did? Would then make some further sense of the big clear-out a while back. |
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Reply | Rest of the Championship thread 25/26
at 14:33 13 Jan 2026
On the other hand, maybe Spurs aren't happy with the minutes he's getting down in Portsmouth and think Coventry's a better prospect? |
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Reply | Morrison going out on loan
at 14:31 13 Jan 2026
When Jimmy was talking about re-signing I think the talk was that the challenge was he wanted 4 years and we were only offering 3. Given he ended up staying, presumably that means we've basically got him until retirement, plus he's club captain. As long as he's fit (and to date he's very rarely injured) he's going to be starting every game for the foreseeable. The club is clearly very high on Edwards so he'll be first choice in the other slot.
Normally that's fine because you want a good third-choice CB for cover, but we already have Cook in that role, plus youth prospects, plus the ghost of JCS. Morrison's chances of playing regularly are pretty low. Why not send him out for the next few months, which keeps him happy, gives him competitive minutes we need him to be getting, and then re-evaluate in the summer when at least one player above him in the depth chart will be gone and he'll have hopefully played 15-20 more games of men's football than he has today? |
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Reply | West hams ground....
at 15:53 12 Jan 2026
Yeah, I should have done that - I didn't want to stand for four hours, but I'd rather have been able to see! |
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Reply | West hams ground....
at 15:09 12 Jan 2026
Been there twice now (not for football). Once in the conference facilities where they refused to let people in before 9am for an event that was meant to start at 9.30, and ended up being delayed until gone 11 because they weren't remotely equipped for bag checking that many people that quickly. Second time for the Iron Maiden gig last year which ran more smoothly, but unbelievable what a poor experience it was - from where I was sat I could basically make out that there was a band on stage, but no more than that, and even the jumbo screens didn't help much. Then I looked to my left and realised there were people 500m further back and 100m higher up, who presumably could just about tell that there was a stage somewhere off in the distance. The side angle of our fans celebrating yesterday says it all. If I were a West Ham fan I'd never go to a game again, it must be completely miserable. |
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Reply | Fourth Round Here We Come Match Thread
at 17:41 11 Jan 2026
Think we can be proud of that. Effort and commitment across the team and a superb captain's performance from Jimmy. More importantly our players looked like they wanted it and felt like they deserved to be there, and absolutely refused to be bullied - loved Kone flooring Castellanos in some of the pre-corner grappling. A far cry from completely wilting against Leicester last season and if only we weren't wracked with injuries we could have gotten over the line. |
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Reply | Dunne rescues QPR from more Boxing Day blues – Report
at 16:53 28 Dec 2025
Some perspective - last season Leeds and Burnley set record points totals in this division winning 29 and 28 games respectively, or 63% and 60% win rates. Sheffield United set the record for points without automatic promotion and still lost nearly a quarter of their games. Even the very best teams in a season when they absolutely dominated the divison didn't win all the time.
More relevant for us, Bristol City made the playoffs with just 17 wins, or a shade under a 39% win rate - they drew 17 and lost 12. Coventry lost 17 last year and won 20 to place 5th. We've played half our games now and are on 35pts - if we replicated our exact form over again we'd finish on 70, more than either of them got last season.
2024/25 was historically poor from 4th downwards, so that likely wouldn't be enough this time around, but we'd still be very close. I think most of us would have taken 70pts and a 7th or 8th place finish before the season started. Of course we should be trying to do better, but to get where we want to be we're talking about a couple of losses turned into draws or a single draw turned into a win - let's say we won 11, drew 6, and lost 6 in the back half of this season, we'd finish on 74pts.
The problem for this team for years and years now has been that every setback has started a death spiral - 1 win in 17, no wins in 14, 5 home wins in a calendar year etc. etc. What we're starting to see instead is that we don't just collapse at the first misfortune; we lose games and come back and win next week, we concede late goals and go up the other end and equalise or take the lead back, we play like sh*t in the first half and come back out and go again and battle back into it. It's easy to talk about it being unacceptable to have a "bad day at the office" or having "standards" but to be honest it's ignoring reality. Very few football teams - very few competitors in any kind of elite sport - are perfect for every minute of every game. Players who deliver at that level aren't down here in the Championship slogging it out, they're playing in the PL for more money than our whole squad put together. What you have to be in this league is good enough for more games than not, and win and draw slightly more often than you lose, and that's exactly where we are at the halfway mark. |
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Reply | Chair
at 22:28 22 Dec 2025
Would have really liked to see Poku come on 10-20 minutes earlier on Saturday. He's looked exciting when he's on the pitch but he's not yet getting much of a run-out, it'd be good to see him get some real minutes and see what he can do. |
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Reply | A miserable return for Marti as white hot QPR incinerate Leicester – Report
at 09:55 22 Dec 2025
Agree with that. You're 4-0 up at home against a team that looks absolutely uninterested in the game, you've got a player with a poor history of injuries who you're managing back to fitness and a capable replacement on the bench, why not gi d him a break with an eye towards a busy run of games over the next 10 days?
One moment I noticed when Ayew got booked - in the handbags thaf preceded it Mbengue started trying to get involved. I've never seen Dunne move so fast as he did to grab him and steer him in the opposite direction. After a shaky start this season Jimmy seems to be really growing into his role as captain and he was excellent on Saturday both in his individual play but also taking charge of his team. |
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Reply | Could we go up.
at 07:09 21 Dec 2025
I think we can make the top 6. I doubt we'd go up though. |
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