Sports The Football Discussion Thread!

This surprises me, I was actually seriously unaware that they were allowed that many subs in the past.

Anyway, this transfer window will be good or bad depending on three things for me.

1 - One of these big transfers (Suarez, Bale, Rooney) actually goes through.
2 - The deadline day is fun and some cool transfers happen on it.
3 - Boro sign a new striker.

Wonder if any of the Norwich FA Youth Cup winning squad will go out on loan this summer. Would love to see what Carlton Morris and the Murphy twins could do in the Championship or League 1. Follows on a bit from the convo last night actually, if people are calling Zaha the new Ronaldo then I predict Morris will be the new Drogbahimovic. Of course they might be like many other young footballers and look good until the final step up.

Still hoping for another couple of signings here but it has gone awfully quiet. Presuming Hooper isn't out for too long I guess the squad is probably strong enough, also thinking there would be a fair amount left for a signing or two in January.

I see Downing is off to West Ham. 3 goals and 5 assists in 65 league games sure is something for a 20 million pound winger.

Finally, I wonder what sort of magic Arsenal used to get that much money for Gervinho. I'd rather get stabbed in the cheek than have him in the Norwich squad.

Downing has had an unlucky time at Liverpool, I read a statistic before the Euros that Downing actually had the highest cross completion rate of any English player in the Premier league (24% iirc) so it could be argued his lack of assists was originally down to Carroll being crap and Suarez not being someone to aim crosses at. If I also remember rightly, Ashley Young had about 15% to put into context how good Downing was compared to other English wingers.

Of course this could affect him again at West Ham if Carroll's poor converting is the cause of the low assists from Downing.

Oh well if he does bad at West Ham we can always take him back. :P

I guess his invincible season did happen when Liverpool were at their worst. Still mightily impressive though.

Downing is an unfortunate case, he's a decent player but buying him for 20 mil was a terrible decision making from Dalglish as it meant he had to live up the level of hype that he was never going to reach.

In my eyes Downing is an okay player, but he can be replaced in the current squade liverpool has. With the player's they have signed this summer (Aspas, Alberto) to some of the youngsters that are playing really well (Sterling, Ibe) Liverpool will be fine without. I really do respect his playing skills and towards the end of last season he seemed to be doing better.

In the past five seasons, only three players (Lampard, Baines & Gerrard) have created more PL chances than Stewart Downing. Crafty. - @OptaJoe

Oddly enough that popped into my twitter feed soon after I posted my comment.

Hopefully things will work out at West Ham and he'll go to Brazil.

Downing gets way too much stuck for what he does. He's a tin can player (does what it says on the tin) in that he'll get down the wings and cross the ball for you, he really won't do anything else. Unfortunately for him that style of play didn't fit Liverpool, especially not under Brendan Rogers. I do believe, however, that as Matt Jarvis has proved Downing will fit perfectly and excel at West Ham.

Downing getting a bad rap is all Liverpool's fault. When you sign a player for 20mil your fans and all the analyst expect a 20mil return and despite Downing doing ok he hasn't repayed what they payed for him. Not his fault really since he definitely wasn't worth the cost but in recent years thats just how Liverpool do business.

20mil for Downing when you bought Mascherano for 17mil and Meireles for 11mil and both are better players.

Yeah, Downing isn't bad, but £20million makes most players look bad...especially English wingers :(.

Also, apparently Ronaldo has been spotted in Manchester. Now obviously this could just mean he's having a visit, perhaps telling Rooney he should stay because there's no way in hell he's coming to Madrid :) Or perhaps now Fergie's gone he's signing for City. Or there's about a 0.0000001% chance I'll be really happy at the end of this month no matter how my exams went :P



I'm not obsessed or anything.

I was starting to get excited about the Everton match but then I remembered Norwich tend not to turn up on the opening day. Coincidentally my first outing to a Norwich game was their last time they won one.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_div_1/2181117.stm

BBC Sport must be the only website that doesn't apply new layouts to all pages. I love finding old ones like that and seeing how it looked back in the day.

That will have even been before Huckerby that game won't it?

While we're on the topic. This was the first Boro game I went to. Very entertaining and Parnaby's late goal was a great experience for my first match.

It certainly was. He and a young Peter Crouch joined on loan a season later, the club supposedly had enough money to buy one of them, so glad that ended up like it did.

Indeed that isn't a bad start. Seems you started going a season after the 4 - 4 with Norwich. Still one of my favourite games. In 360ish games for Norwich Adam Drury only scored 4 goals, one of them was to save a point in that game.

I only wish I could've got to more games around that time, but I didn't really have anyone to go with at the time. I only regularly started going two seasons ago unfortunately so I missed all the Premier League moments.

I started off going with my step dad and then for 5 or 6 years with a friend from school, that friend was actually a West Ham fan mind.

Watching the Ingerland under 21s beat Scotland atm, Redmond looking pretty gud. Not a fan of BT Sport's layout, the scores being on the bottom of the screen just feels wrong.

I'm not sure if it's opening day or not but I seem to remember Norwich losing 6-1 to Colchester (I think?) once. Bit random but it's one of those things that sticks out in my memory.

It was indeed the opening day but it was in fact 7 - 1.

On the day it was awful but in retrospect it is probably the best thing that could have happened. It was the result that saw Bryan Gunn sacked (he only kept his job after being relegated due to his status here tbh), his replacement got us promoted 2 times in 2 seasons and lead the team to 12th in the Premier League.

Didn't you get Paul Lambert from Colchester the week after as well? Just remembered how good a player Jamie Cureton used to be haha.

Certainly did.

Jamie Lad, as he is known around here was/is pretty gud. Never really set the world alight at Norwich, although I guess nobody did during the time he was here. I think he scored on his Cheltenham début the other day actually.

Norwich 1-7 Colchester is probably the best use of the phrase "Blessing in Disguise" - It certainly helped change things around there for the better. I think Norwich won 5-0 in reverse fixture.