DMAA

You’re being a bit snide as usual but yes if Helander was available it’s a baffling decision and it cost us last night with two moments of very poor defending.

He is a much better defender than Balogun though and you don’t see him giving away goals like Balogun did last night. The stats show that Helander is our best traditional defender too, we always look vulnerable without IMO.

Malmö and Ludogorets and we’d have made the CL group stage. It’s a massive failure and a painful one.

Kaunus surely the best example. Off the back of a great season and humiliated at the first hurdle.

He wasn’t directly at fault like Balogun was tonight.

Baffled by the decision to drop Helander for Balogun. Absolutely schoolboy defending from Balogun has cost us tonight and Gerrard has to take the blame for dropping our best man marker. There were loads of other failures out there tonight but those goals were sucker punches and should never have happened. This is now a very worrying start to the season and those who have brushed off the red flags to date will have woken up now. Hard work ahead and big decisions to be made in the transfer market.

Bunch of cheats, constantly diving and play acting on the ground to waste time

This is shockingly poor, no chance are we scoring 2

Of course he should have been tracked. We needn’t go overboard with criticism but Lundstram takes a chunk of the blame for the goal.

Yeh of course it’s too early to draw conclusions, I’m just theorising because I very rarely buy that “attitude” is the cause of poor performance, and fitness is one of the most likely explanations for what could be perceived by fans as laziness, what he did yesterday certainly reminded me of myself at 5s many a time. He may be like Arfield and have seasons of energy in his season.

He’s supposed to be, his stats at SU showed that he was very weak defensively but pretty good going forward. To me he looks very unfit and I don’t really know what his excuse is, and I find it a bit concerning that SU fans complained at how lazy he was all of last season, some players do lose a bit of their fitness/energy earlier in their career than others, I hope that isn’t happening with Lundstram.

Hmm. I just finished watching Sportscene there, Aribo was involved in absolutely everything decent we did but he can’t do it all by himself. Kent had literally one involvement in our attacks in the highlights and it was just a cross, he really needs to improve and fast. Kent’s other involvement was giving the ball away badly before their goal.

There’s no denying that it has been a bit of a worrying start to the season tbh. Preseason was badly disrupted and we are already having bad luck with our players (Roofe, Hagi, Jack). Scott Wright very unlucky not to start, or get on sooner. For Malmö I think he should come in for Lundstram with Aribo moving back one.

Hopefully it was at least a very valuable workout for a few players. We had some players out there who were simply not match fit. It should also serve to underline the need not to be complacent or take qualification for granted. I fully trust Gerrard to make sure the job gets done. It could even be a means of motivation that Olympiacos drew at home in their fixture. There is a chance we could get to the groups via Malmö and Ludogorets.

Annoyingly I was only able to catch bits of the game tonight despite having bought it. From the bits I saw though I thought Lundstram looked dead on his feet? Seemed we were really missing the legs of Jack and Kamara.

Wow! Massive goal. My internet just died die the last ten minutes so I missed it.

Yeh I prefer to avoid “best player” conversations because I think we had a different best player most months (if not weeks) last season.

Roofe played a massive part in our title win last season. The highest goals per minute in the team by a mile and we’ve barely even seen him fully fit. Sadly I don’t expect he’ll ever get a very long spell without injury at Rangers though.

Fivethirtyeight’s rankings have us in 49th and them in 54th, so really closely matched. Interestingly we have a marginally better offensive score and they have a marginally better defensive ranking. For comparison, Young Boys are 50th, Slavia 74th (strange) and RB Salzburg 19th. Fivethirtyeight give stats some weight as well as results I believe so are a much better gauge than UEFA rankings.

They put PSV out of the Europa League last season and then Arsenal put them out, 1-3 loss at home followed by 1-0 win at the Emirates.

I think people are underestimating them. They won a much better league than ours by 26 points last season and made the UCL. They are very much on a high. Having said that I thought there wasn’t much between any of the teams we could have drawn, I’m glad we avoided Salzburg but Olympiacos were probably the 2nd hardest teams of the 4.

Scott Wright scoring is a big positive for me from today. Similar to Kent from a couple of seasons ago in that he could do with adding some numbers to his game to gain some confidence and build on it. Scoring a goal like that in the opening game could be a big confidence boost. Over to you Andy Halliday.

I still think he’ll be going out on loan. People have gotten carried away with preseason games but he didn’t exactly excel at Ross County last season. Needs to do more at a similar club this season IMO, far more profitable than being 6th choice here.

This selection shows a lot of confidence in the strength of our squad. Big opportunities for Sakala and Bassey in particular.