POLL........How will we finish the upcoming season

There is plenty of time for this to happen and I also believe we will get 2 or 3 good loans in.

 

As it stands you'd have to say mid to low table. But as DT says, we'll have a better idea in September and we have the endless loan window too.

 

You surely don't mean Caulker was terrible in the air do you?

Some people wont like this (not aimed at you), but I'm going to support my point with some facts rather than popular bias:

http://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2015/07/30/five-stats-southampton-complete-loan-for-qprs-steven-caulker/

"Having won 4.2 aerial duels per game, no defender among Queens Park Rangers or Southampton's ranks won more headers per average appearance than Caulker. Richard Dunne proved his closest competitor (2.7 per game)"

Thats a pretty big gap. His size, strength and athletic ability make him great in the air and I would say by far our best header of the ball. And some pretty conclusive stats back up that belief.

Now we are looking at Tim Ream. I'll wait for the deal to get done before pointing out the inevitable bad economics of that deal but I have had a quick look on Bolton message board just now and found thread titled, "Tim Ream- a centre half stuck in a left backs body"

With much support for this opinion, "I'd rather have him in front of the back four personally if we could get our back line sorted, he has got a great range of passing."

And, "I've never been convinced by him at centre back, always seemed to struggle physically"

You heard it here first, we will score way too many goals from set pieces and corners this year

 

For fukk's sake

 

No, Caulker is excellent in the air. He's just crap at everything else.
I was expecting him to score a good few goals from our corners last season, but he didn't even do that! Mind you, that could well be a reflection of the quality of our corners.

 

Just pointing out on top of not being a reliable CD.....Caulker is definitely not the right sort, two semi covered up incidents of violence, wrong attitude, very costly on wage bill.

He is not that good to disrupt the team ethos that is being built. He is gone...l yes get on with rebuilding

 

"Having won 4.2 aerial duels per game, no defender among Queens Park Rangers or Southampton's ranks won more headers per average appearance than Caulker. Richard Dunne proved his closest competitor (2.7 per game)"

This is, of course, misleading as being the taller and most agile of the two he would have (or should have) been marking the tallest player who would more often than not be the target from corners.

Statistics are all and well, but they are just raw data and will not tell the whole story.

Having won an average of 4.2 aerial duels per game ...... can we see that as a percentage of the number of aerial duels he competed in. If the total number of duels is 10 to 20 then 4.2 is crap. If Dunne averaged 2.7 per game but was only involved in 3 or 4 duels then that makes his conversion rate much better!

People read into statistics exactly what they want to bolster their own opinion.

 

The Mods are being quite sneaky in deleting people's posts without telling them

 

How can someone that often talks very silly talk so much sense?

 

No sure what you're on about Swordsie?

 

I think you know quite well!

 

No......

 

With such a big gap there I really don't think you can explain it away as a negative.

You prove the point yourself by saying the biggest dangerman on the opposition and most likely target for corners is marked by Caulker. If he wasn't our best at winning headers then he wouldn't be marking that man.

 

I posted up a picture of Jack Nicholson getting Electroconvulsive Therapy and y'all deleted it!

 

Fink someone is trying to trick me. That sh*t weren't around when I checked it at 2am last night

Bizarre

 

I had a friend like you Swordsie. Parked her Mini on a street corner, and the following week, went to the wrong corner to find it and then reported it stolen!

 

Sorry to be pedantic but what's bizarre Swords is that you think 2am is at night