Oh Heck C-Beck

But I guess on the flip side you could say only wasteful finishing and the woodwork kept Oldham from taking all 3pts. Sounds like it is very fine margins between success and failure at the moment.

Have,football fans always been this knee jerk or is it a modern phenomenon? the negativity gets tedious. I would go further than Wenger and say that for some on owtb a draw is a crisis! Almost as many posts as when we lose these days!

From listening to lattice player there is very fine margins between success and failure this season. If we are lightweight in midfield I am surprised we are dominating possession. To me it sounds like poor finishing, bad final balls and individual errors are costing us not necessarily tactics.

I'd still go with Rooney with another (probably MacDonald again). Don't think the team is really struggling for goals, more the leaky defense that has us where we are at the moment. The opposite to usual.

If Rooney keeps getting chances I would stick with him. I fully admit I was not keen on Smith at all the last couple of seasons. He was missing plenty of chances, but it came good in the end any he proved me wrong. I also remember Porter missing a lot in his first season here. He ended up with 9 I think, before hitting 20+ in the second season.

Only going off the highlights, but even though by all accounts we played badly, we still created some good clear cut chances which has to be a positive compared to seasons gone by where we have been getting just half chances.

So everyone is angry that we played awful and didn't lose. Isn't that supposed to be the sign of a good team?

Personally don't think it sounds that bad. No mention of becoming a B team, just more regimented system for loans. Would it really be that bad getting a group of players from City or United each season. Imagine if a group like Beckham, Scholes, Butt, Neville game through again and they all got sent to the same club! Lets not kid ourselves, for the past x amount of years we have taken large amounts of loan players to plug gaps. I would much rather we had a formal arrangement with a good club that allowed us to bring in 4 players that already know each other for the season.

Anyone with sources at Latics know if LJ has lost the dressing room? These things usually surface on here pretty quickly!

That is very odd, yet very detailed!

The thing is the likes of Rooney etc would have worked hard as young players like Rusnak hence them making it all the way to the top. It's a bit sad that some of these youngsters think they can behave like this before proving anything. Totally agree with you about attitude needing to be right. I'm hoping LJ is a manager who will be consistent in getting rid of players who don't want to give their all for the club and so far the sans are promising

Don't get the outright hatred for Porter yeah he shafted us but he also fired us into the play offs. That must have been worth something surely?

It was more a general lighthearted dig at some peoples attitudes towards Oxley than a detailed response to your post. Hence, my reply to yongen and not you, and my use of ;) Why, not do me a favour and stop getting so touchy over a throwaway message board comment.

People need someone to blame! Young Goalkeeper on loan from a Premier League club is the perfect choice ;)

Personally I think Millar and Winchester are squad fillers. I think LJ see's Tarkowski as one of the first names on the teamsheet, Mellor/Brown as fully fledged first team squad players and Gossett/Truelove as ones who can push on. Not every kid has got to make it to prove Dickov right.

fair enough he didnt play well, but why write one player off because they got sent off and had one bad game. He was more than capable of helping us stay up at the end of last season. I don't see why his future should be in doubt? Why can't he be part of our squad and keep fighting for his place. I remember when Craig Davies got sent off vs Rochdale and he became public enemy number 1 with the fans. Not had a bad career since leaving Latics at all.

Pretty sure Mellor/Brown are classed as first team players this season even if they don't start every match, rather than young players on the fringe.

At the end of the day Latics have not been great over the last 20 years, I rather see us try and play ood football and entertain and lose instead of serving up the usual crap and lose. If you play good football there is always a chance you can turn it around too.

The worst thing on that replay is the push and stamp on Mellor, not the retaliation

I checked a few other clubs Player sites including Charlton who used to give away the full match, but not found any full matches or extended highlights yet. I then got my account suspended for logging in to too many and had to get customer support to reactivate it, so might ask around on a general football forum to see what other clubs are offering. I guess it the clubs might not be allowed to offer full highlights. However, if there is no legal reason why they cant do it, I see no reason why we can't try and persuade them to upload the games. I expect the excuses to be along the lines of, they don't want to discourage people from going the games, or it takes up too much space, extended highlights is too long. To counteract that I would suggest they could upload the games a few days after, they could upload unedited full games with no commentary, and if it takes up too much space, they could just overwrite the full match highlights every week with the new game.

Thanks for the comments and its good to see that people would be interested in full match/longer highlights. I don't really know how we could make this happen or if the club would actually take us seriously, but I was thinking if a few more people were keen we could either put all our names on an email over to the club or all email the club at the same time with the same request. to show there is genuine interest from the fans. I will do a little research on Latics Player and see if any clubs are currently offering full highlights this season.

Do most latics expats use Latics player? would anyone be keen on pressing the club to upload the full matches at some point? I don't really care about good editing or commentary. Just want to experience us playing some good football. I know other clubs do or have don this in the past, Charlton was definitely one club that did this. If the club is allowed to do this I don't think it should be that difficult for them to implement.

Since I've watched England we got to a semi final under Robson, Venebles and have been unlucky not to progress in tournaments under Hoddle and Erikson. Yes we haven't won a tournament but its a complete myth that England are rubbish at football, many teams have not even qualified for a tournament in this time. On everyone of these occasions we were knocked out on penalties except by brazil in 2002. Even under Hodgson we were a penalty shoot out win away from a semi final after scraping a draw with Italy.

Don't think many people think we are a superpower, but we are not as bad as many people make out. There are over 200 countries competing in international football remember. I have just moved to Japan and over the last 2 weeks have seen them play Guatemala and Ghana in friendlies and I don't think the quality is on a par with the European nations at all. We get spoiled it is easy to forget how bad some of the other countries are. For me England is not going to be winning a World Cup any time soon, but we should be qualifying and getting out of the group stages with the players we have available. I would argue we are or should be a top 8 European side and a top 16 world side. I think the main problem is Hodgson. As fans we want to see free flowing winning football, he is setting us up not to lose first and foremost. I think we have a good enough team to be more adventurous than that, but maybe it is too late now with qualifying far from guaranteed. If we do miss out, I would like us to look somewhere else, thank him for helping us out before the last Euros and move on.

Thought Mellor came in at the end of last season and was excellent, surprised he hasn't been given a chance in CM this season. He is the one player who can pick a pass to unlock a defence through the middle IMO out of our central midfield options.