Where the season went wrong.....

[Profondo Rosso]

Asking Sven to "give us a wave" the middling season.

 

[SwedeFox]

Sven opening an envelope sent from a Mr Super Scout, deciding to throw it in the bin but then picking it up again and thinking "hang on, £5 million for Matt Mills - that's a steal. I better sign all the names on this list".

 

[Profondo Rosso]

The moment I dreamed I was on the Nile, shimmy-shimmy-shy-eye-meece-a-deece, dancing with you Egyptian style, shimmy-shimmy-shy-eye-meece-a-deece.

 

[indierich06]

Sacking Nigel Pearson.

 

[Profondo Rosso]

when lcfc went and gone. :icon_sad:

 

[The Old Fox]

Sacking Nigel Pearson.

Just for a moment, I was excited by this! :icon_bigg

 

[Willlow]

I'd have played Drinkwater still, you don't throw in a lightweight midfielder just back from injury into the starting line up for a combative fixture. Players have bad games, doesn't mean they should be dropped for the next one. Rooney had a shocker against Wigan, he still started against Villa and scored twice, whilst still playing within himself. Drinkwater came off the bench and scored which suggests relegating him to the bench wasn't the greatest idea.

Or relegating him to the bench gave him a kick up the arse that he needed...

Interesting that your argument is that Drinkwater playing well when he came on as sub means that he should have started. Yet King shouldnt have played, even though he did well when he came off the bench against Ipswich...

Finally...why should Drinkwater play in a 'combative' game when he failed to be 'combative' in a game that wasn't 'combative'...

 

[Miles Away]

Neither of them really set the world alight during Sven's tenure - they were hardly the lynchpin of our promotion campaign.

Once Sven was sacked Fernandes didn't want to play for the club anymore, I doubt it mattered who we brought in, Fernandes only came because Sven was here, so if he didn't want to be here, what could Pearson have done?

With regards to Abe, he was homesick and no longer wanted to live in this country. Can you blame us for letting him return to his family, would it have been better to have kept him against his wishes?

The question wasn't whether Pearson could have kept these players, it was whether Sven had any ball-winning midfielders on the books...in my mind, he did.

 

[Miles Away]

Don't really see how Abe or Fernandes were ball winning midfielders.

Abe was probably one of the players you'd least expect to win the ball and Fernandes was just an energetic box-to-box midfielder who got around a lot and played a lot of one-twos, but I don't remember him being a very good ball winner.

We obviously view the game very differently.

 

[Blue Maniac]

In a word, yes. In a lot more words....

Beg the question
Meaning
This is one of those rare phrases in which the meaning is more debated than the origin.
The usage which has become common in recent years has a meaning something along the lines of 'prompt/raise the question', that is, 'beg that the question be asked'. This is usually seen in circumstances where something is described and then an explanation is sought; for example, this piece from a 2003 edition of the Jamaican newspaper The Gleaner:
What we are saying here is that every 2 days a juvenile is arrested and it begs the question, "What is really happening to our parents?"
This usage is understandable and has presumably come about by interpreting the 'beg' of 'beg the question' as 'request' or 'humbly submit'. This is the meaning of the word in the similar phrase 'beg to differ'.
The original meaning was quite different though. To 'beg the question' was coined as a rather over-literal translation of the Latin phrase 'petitio principii'. The Latin version was itself a translation of Greek text 'en archei aiteisthai' taken from Aristotle's Prior Analytics. The phrase was known in English by at least 1581, at which date it was recorded by William Clarke:
"Ffiij, I say this is still to begge the question."
The logical constructs that Aristotle was describing were statements which assume the truth that one is attempting to prove. Those might be questions which have an assertion smuggled into them, like 'Why has England fewer trees per acre than any other country in Europe?'. Or, more commonly, the fallacious reasoning that we now usually call a 'circular argument'; for example, 'He must be speaking the truth because he never lies'. The 'truth' being assumed in advance isn't always so blatant. René Descartes' famous 'I think, therefore I am' can be said to be begging the question as he must exist before he can think - it is hardly a proof of anything to state 'I exist, therefore I am'.
If things weren't obscure enough with this phrase there was a version of the meaning that emerged between the two given above. That was its use to mean 'avoid the question'. This presumably also came from a misreading of 'beg' to follow the meaning of 'beggar description' or 'beggar belief'. That meaning of beggar, which seems to have been coined by Shakespeare in Anthony and Cleopatra, 1606, is 'exceed the resources of; go beyond':
"For her owne person It beggerd all discription."
Most authorities now view the current 'raise the question' meaning as acceptable, even if that is a somewhat grudging recognition that the weight of numbers of those who use it that way is overwhelming. It is also suggested by some that the minority who know and understand the original version should avoid using it, unless they are amongst consenting adults, as they aren't likely to be understood. That would be an unfortunate route to take. Whatever we might prefer, it is very likely that the percentage of the population that knows, or cares, that they are using the phrase incorrectly will continue to decline.

Your c&p skills are unrivalled. Have a sticker.

 

[Profondo Rosso]

Fernandes I can kind of see, though I still think he was just as much a ball-winner as Danns or Wellens are (i.e. not really one at all) but Abe a ball winning midfielder? Really? He mopped up loose balls in front of the defence, but I can't see how anyone could've seen him as a ball-winning midfielder.

 

[Miles Away]

Fernandes I can kind of see, though I still think he was just as much a ball-winner as Danns or Wellens are (i.e. not really one at all) but Abe a ball winning midfielder? Really? He mopped up loose balls in front of the defence, but I can't see how anyone could've seen him as a ball-winning midfielder.

Depends how you define ball-winning I suppose.

Was Robbie Savage a ball winner? Or Neil Lennon? Because there is a distinction there.

 

[Profondo Rosso]

I don't know, I'm too young to have really gotten a good picture of how they played.

A ball winning midfielder can be a midfielder who reads the game and intercepts passes, yes, but I never saw Abe do that either, he was more a player who tended to stand in front of the defence and quickly jumped on the ball when it came lose rather than reading a pass and intercepting it. Which isn't ball winning at all, it's just mopping up (not saying it isn't an important job).

 

[Miles Away]

I don't know, I'm too young to have really gotten a good picture of how they played.

A ball winning midfielder can be a midfielder who reads the game and intercepts passes, yes, but I never saw Abe do that either, he was more a player who tended to stand in front of the defence and quickly jumped on the ball when it came lose rather than reading a pass and intercepting it. Which isn't ball winning at all, it's just mopping up (not saying it isn't an important job).

We saw different players I suppose. Abe cosed down very well, and did often break up passes, at least the Abe I saw (when not played out of position).

 

[TornadoShaunUK]

I think we really missed a player like Danns against Millwall so that was unfortunate but it's obviously not good enough that we are so poor against the lower placed sides and it's hard to point out exactly why that is. Perhaps we just don't 'like it up us', or perhaps there is a sense of 'let's get this over with and get the three points' against these kind of teams where we may feel we don't have to put in as much effort as against the better teams in the division...

 

[DesertFox]

We've been an average side all season and we're going to finish mid table.

Has it actually gone wrong?

 

[Lako42]

Money spent V end of season position


The above would suggest something has gone wrong, I totally blame the lack of stability for any manager here, instigated by the fans delusions of grandeur and totally pathetic attitude to long term building.

 

[Darth Vodka]

how are Reading getting on without Mills?

 

[indierich06]

how are Reading getting on without Mills?

They shipped loads of goals and ended up having to settle for mid table mediocrity. Oh no wait, that was us with Mills in the side.

 

[Matt_B]

Money spent V end of season position


The above would suggest something has gone wrong, I totally blame the lack of stability for any manager here, instigated by the fans delusions of grandeur and totally pathetic attitude to long term building.

Pretty much sums it up I think.