JA11K

Used to play for United I think.

Well I'm making this my first away game of the season, will be going alone since my dad can't make it so I hope there's a cracking atmosphere to make up for it!

How many do we reckon we're taking then?

Those saying no thanks to Smith... he has scored nine goals in the Championship, four more than our highest goalscorer in the league this season. Much better option than we have this year, although admittedly our lack of proper wingers atm would have hindered him.

I didn't say it was, but without Wes we would get overrun much more frequently. If Smith pushed higher up the pitch, in conjunction with a striker dropping a bit deeper and offering someone to rotate around (Philliskirk when on form), we'd have a lot more goals in the team. The problem is that Smith is quite reclusive (though whether this is his decision of LJ's remains unseen), giving us little chance of outnumbering the opposition's defence. If we had a midfield trio like this: Wes Smith Philliskirk You could have Wes sitting and breaking up play, Smith feeding the ball out wide and to Philliskirk before pushing forward and joining the attack as a goalscoring threat (something he has looked loathe to do admittedly), and Philliskirk acting as a pivot, working little one-twos with his back to goal before spinning off, feeding the ball through to the striker or even just having a shot himself. That way, when the ball is out wide you have four players in the penalty area (Smith, Philli, Striker and opposite winger), whereas now we only usually have one or two, while when it's in the middle you've got the wingers running in behind, the striker playing off the last man, and one of Philli and Smith to get into the box as well. Even with one full-back pushing forward we should have enough cover to deal with a counter-attack, with Wes going wide to cover it and the three remaining defenders there to mop up any balls into the penalty area. It's probably much more complicated than that, but getting numbers forward is a much better way of attacking than our current method of 'get it to Harkins'.

It doesn't matter what division they play in, the point is that defensive midfielders are a key part of football and Wes, with his strong tackling ability, is well-suited to this role at our level. Obviously he is not at their level, but for a League One midfielder he is more than capable, as will be shown when he moves on to better things at the end of the season. If you want to be blind to that, that's fine by me - I'd love to see you choose a side with a central midfielder who can't tackle, it'd be great fun watching us getting completely overrun in the middle.

Wes wins more headers than the majority of the players on our team, he is strong in the air. Ok then, there's no such thing as a defensive midfielder, I forgot about that one - someone should tell Sergio Busquets or Javi Martinez.

You are clueless. 'totally confuse the roles that they play' - Wesolowski is the more defensive of the two, which he pointed out. Plus, you mentioned in your original post that he can't tackle, yet this is his strongest attribute and one that he has demonstrated time and time again to stop teams running through the middle of us this season, as well as saying that he can't head; but for someone his size, he seems to come out on top in a rather large percentage of the headed battles that he contests. Wesolowski has been comfortably one of our best players this season.

Forest was a freak in a competition which Dickov knew he was under no pressure to succeed. I agree that at the beginning of his tenure he made some good subs, but they soon dried up (which LJ doesn't seem likely to do) and, had he managed in the league with the same mentality as he did in that Forest game, he would have been much better off. Unfortunately, after the defeats by Southampton and Peterborough in his first season, it seems like he was more scared to fail than he was driven to succeed and he became much more conservative. Hopefully this won't happen with LJ, but of course none of us saw it with PD either.

Obvious one being Peterborough. Dickov would wait far too long to make subs, LJ made three at half-time on Tuesday night which made us much more competitive. Yes you could argue that he chose the wrong starting lineup, but at least he recognised the need to change things - towards the end of Dickov's time he'd often wait until the 75th/80th minute to make subs which was completely ineffective. Even when he made them he wouldn't change the system to suit them; he'd bring Smith on, have us hoof the ball to him, watch him win headers and have no-one around him to run onto them and no-one putting crosses in for him to win. It was just hoof and hope.

We're performing to the standard that I expected at the beginning of the season - it might not be the free-scoring football that some expected, but, in terms of results and league position, if you expected to be higher than where we currently are then you were kidding yourself.

If Winchester had started the game, we'd have been in a much better position going into half-time. Dunfield was too reserved and too often out of position, when we have Wesolowski sitting deep someone has to provide a form of momentum from central midfield and Dunfield was not that man tonight - maybe he'll come good in the future, but it didn't seem to me like he was capable of doing that role based on tonight. I don't know it was LJ's or Philliskirk's decision to bring him into a narrower role than a right-winger should have, but it was caused by the lack of a passing midfielder who can spread the ball across the pitch (e.g. Smith, Winchester) and made it very difficult for us to harm MK Dons or do anything at all with the ball. It was easy for them to stop our attacks because there was no momentum coming from the middle of the pitch, and nothing on the right where Connor Brown was left on his own. It improved in the second-half when we went 3 across the middle with Dayton and Brown as wing-backs, but we shouldn't have had to resort to that - it should be pretty obvious that you can't play with two reserved central midfielders, particularly at home. Very poor.

Either way, brilliant save.

Winchester is a classy player on the ball, if he pushed slightly higher up the pitch he'd be a real threat. IMO, if we could only keep one out of him, Mellor and Millar it'd be Winchester. Harkins brilliant as usual, everything about Oxley has already been said, Wes strong too.

Would be happy with 2 wins and a draw from the next few games, I can see us losing to MK away but the other three are there for the taking. Serious question - if we won 3 and drew one, do you think we could make the top ten? Play-offs are out of reach now obviously, but if that happened then top ten may be a possibility? (I'm not saying this will happen btw, just saying that, if we do get ten points, it's a possibility)

Didn't go but brilliant stuff to go there and get a win. Sounds like we were unlucky to come up against arguably the best goalkeeper in the league as well, seems like Foderingham made some very good saves to keep it to 1!

Are you serious?! Most deals are undisclosed nowadays, and how anyone can say we're kept in the dark after LJ's honesty at the meet the manager meetings is deluded - what do you want, to have a live stream of the chairman's and manager's office on the club website?!

The guy we had on trial?

That second half... wow. I've never seen us do that to a good team, just absolutely blitz them, it was an incredible performance.

You can't in real life though, I've seen him in the flesh and he'd be a good player for us

Goodwillie http://www1.skysports.com/football/news/11730/9116050/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Can't really drop Philliskirk and it would be harsh to drop Petrasso, he's been one of our best players recently. It'd also be ridiculous to move Smith from CM. Oxley Kusunga Tarky Grounds Mellor Worrall Smith Wes Petrasso Philliskirk JCH Could see Philliskirk moved to the RW though and Harkins played in the hole.

I also clapped him off, no one else around me did though.

Gerrard is an absolute class above, it's a pleasure watching him.

That's true, I reckon L2 is about his level for now but I'm sure if he works on his game he can go higher - last game I watched him was last Saturday and he played a really nice ball through to Gregory (who scored, obviously haha)