ram59

Maybe it's an insurance policy to avoid relegation, whilst building for next season's promotion push. After all, they are only 4 points above the drop zone, if we were in their position, most of us would be in meltdown by now. Talking of which, it's funny some of our posters being envious of Charlton's position and their 'making a statement'.

CBT doesn't need to 'replace' anyone, football is now a team game consisting of 15 outfield players playing over around 100 minutes. Ideally, we could do with one front line starting and another front line on the bench, ready to come on against a tiring defence. This already seems to be in Warne's plans as our subs have scored more goals than any other lg1 team this season, CBT will only improve these 15 players.

What about having all 3 games at Wembley, on the same day, with a 15 minute break between matches, an even better plan?😁

Another good suggestion, the only downside being that the third place team will have had a long break between the last game of the season and the final.

Not such a daft idea at all in my opinion. You should be rewarded for your exploits over 46 games. You could have a formula worked out whereby you have a 1 goal advantage for finishing 1 to 4 points ahead of your opposition, 2 goals for 5 to 8 and 3 goals for anything more than that. It would maintain interest right to the end of the season because every point is valuable, target than making the playoffs and resting players, when they autos are out of reach.

Incorrect, Notts Forest made Notts Forest look a really poor side.

The EFL and football leagues around the world have, for over a 100 years, decided that 46 games or less have been enough games to fairly decide who is good enough to win championships, gain promotions or bad enough to suffer relegations. At the end of the day, football league tables are just statistics and these are the statistics that decide where we play next season. What do you suggest, each season to last 5 or 6 years and 2 or 3 hundred matches, so we know who's truly the best and worst and who really deserves promotion and relegation?

That's the problem with not been allowed to pay a fee, last January we weren't allowed to spend 20p never mind £20k on a player. That stopped us from buying any player showing promise that was under contract, which is everyone in January, unless there's a mutual agreement to cancel the contract.

An accepted part of transfer fees are the 'add ons', in our case promotion to the championship and throughout the leagues it could other promotions or avoiding relegation. Let's take our situation, promotion will be worth an extra £6m minimum, so a few hundred thousand paid out on promotion will hardly be noticed. But, say we sign Moxon with this add on and we need a win on the final day of the season to guarantee promotion, Carlisle who are already relegated play a load of youngsters and collect a nice 'add on' bonus to spend on rebuilding their team in lg2. The system is open to abuse or perceived abuse. Transfer this situation to the championship/premier promotion/relegation situation and those 'add ons' are then counted in millions.

It's probably a case of Charlton want 500k, but we can't pay or justify that amount in this year's figures. So, we offer about 300k this year plus another 300k after June providing we get promotion, which will come out of next season's higher revenue. Basically, we could be tempting Charlton with a possible higher figure than they're asking for, on the gamble that we get promotion. It'll help if they let us beat them in the two games that we've got with them.😉 Can you imagine the fuss if that was to happen though?

Teams were always doing this against us last season and I hated it, but if you can't beat them, join them. Personally, whenever there is an 'injury' and the physio comes on to treat the player, I would make the rest of the players go to the centre circle and allow a young 'waterboy' on to the pitch with bottles of water. Although, it wouldn't stop the break up of play, it would help to stop the tactical team talks with the manager.

I've just posted about 'selective' stats on the Burton matchday thread. I addition to your stats, we are by far the strongest team between the 75 and 90 minutes with 15 scored and 5 conceded, but 5th bottom after the 90th minute with only 1 scored and 3 conceded. Incidently Northampton are top in injury time at 7 to 2. Does this indicate that our lads run out of steam or just switch off in injury time?

You missed my point, I said SEEMINGLY contradictory, I was trying to point out that on their own, selective statistics can be used to 'prove' a point or make an assumption, which is not necessarily correct. Those figures that I gave suggested how strongly we finished games, but mean nothing unless you include the number of goals that we also concede late in games. Also, it would be of little use if we scored twice in the last few minutes of every game, if we were losing by 3 goals each time. In fact, in terms of injury time goals, we're one place outside of the relegation zone with 1 for and 3 against, with Northampton top having scored 7 and conceding 2 in injury time. Our strongest period is between the 75 and 90 minutes, with 15 to 5 conceded which is vastly better than the second placed team, P'boro on 8 and 3. I'm almost beginning to sound like GOC, the king of stats.😉

Thanks GOC, these stats seem to back up my theory that we just sat back and contained the game in the second half, it would interesting to know the quality (the dreaded xg) of their chances in the second half, but that can be subjective.

Equally laughable is that you're saying that a keeper should then be able to save every shot. There must be some top keepers out there that have never conceded goal, unless they made a mistake. I think that you need to look at a few goal of the month or season clips, they're full of shots that no keeper could save.

I see that Barnsley gained points with yet another late controversial goal. A strongly disputed penalty gave them an extra 2 points, added to a further 3 points gained a late challenge on a time wasting keeper resulting in a winning goal and a late equaliser from a cross when the ball had gone out by about 2 foot. Let's hope that their luck runs out soon.

Statistics can be used to say many different things, these show a quite even match slightly in favour of the home team, but what were the stats at ht? We were 4-1 up then, with the game 'won', naturally we go a bit more cautious, unlike against Burton, this drastically reduces our attacking stats in the second half and probably allows a few distance shots from the desperate home team. The stats don't reveal how many of those attempts in the second half really troubled our keeper. Here's 2 interesting but seemingly contradicting stats, Derby have scored more goals than anyone else after the 75 minute mark, this would suggest that we finish more strongly than anyone else. On the other hand, if the final whistle had been blown dead on 90 minutes for every game this season, Derby would be 3 points clear at the top and 5 points clear of 'pompy'. This would suggest that Derby don't finish as strongly as 'Pompy' and Bolton, at least.

Are yes, because of the infamous Germany v Austria fixed result, we ended up playing Germany in the second round group games. Because of this match, all following world cup tournaments had final group games played at the same time. I saw this game live on tv in Crete whilst England's final game was on over here. I walked out of the tv lounge in disgust after about 30 minutes, telling the German tourists that they were a bunch of cheating bar tenders. A low scoring win for Germany was required, for both teams to qualify and after they scored in 10 minutes, neither team went any where near the other's penalty area. I'm still bitter about it, just in case you hadn't noticed.

Unsavable, probably not the correct term, but I've seen world class goalies let in easier chances, frequently. It's easy to criticise a goalkeeper's actions after a goal, but quite often the different actions would have resulted in a different goal. I know from personal experience, whenever I let a goal in, I'm forever asking myself 'if I'd done this or that, they wouldn't have scored', but then the following week when I did do this or that, they scored anyway, just in a different manner. That's a great big goal to protect and if a striker does his job properly, there are occasions when it can't be stopped by the goalkeeper alone. There are obvious goalkeeper errors then there's the ones where you think what if? Those what if ones could have probably resulted in a goal scored in a different way. The 3 goals that Vickers has conceded have all been amongst the most difficult attempts that needed saving this season. He hasn't been given the chance to show whether he is up to Wildsmith's shot stopping ability yet.

Yes...................................................if you could guarantee that Seddon played like that most weeks, but sadly, it seems that it was a bit of a one off performance from him (he's ranked at 219 on whoscored,com stats at a very average 6.57, even below our much maligned Korey Smith). It's a bit unfair to call time on Elder, after all, he was only making his third start in an injury ravaged season, but then we love to slag off some our own players at the drop of a hat.

It may have failed to catch your attention that the installation, problems and first prosecutions and lying in courts happened under the Blair/Brown governments. It's well documented that they knew about it, but didn't want to upset the 'applecart'. Unfortunately, rarely do we have box to tick, whereby we get a politician who looks after us first and foremost.

Not a chance this month, but should he stay at Notts and we got promotion, I could see it happening then.

Even non-league players command a fee, if they're under contract or under 24. We even had to pay non-league Worcester City about 15k for Roger Davies in the 70s, something that could not have done over the last few years. The only players that we have been able to sign are frees. This means that they're out of contract and over 24 years old. Generally speaking players whose contract has run down, are not sufficiently wanted by their club to have been offered a decent contract early enough.

I think that this is why Warne wants to play 3 at the back. Ideally, we need 2 strikers, a wide player on both wings and 3 in the middle. Unfortunately, that only leaves 3 players at the back. This calls for a special type of player to play in the wing back positions. You can end up with players who don't do enough as a winger or a fullback in this situation or are stronger in one of the positions.

Not surprised by this, their away numbers last night must have been well over half the number that go to the home games. They probably only turn up for home games against big opposition in the cups or Derby. All credit to the club though, for being able to compete with the likes Derby on crowds of 3,000.