Trying to think positive...O Leary's first season/now.

[Percy McCarthy]

I'd heard of Guzan.

Sorry.

[kippaxvilla2]

I'd heard of Guzan.

Sorry.

I need to be punished for lying through my back teeth....:-)

[kipeye]

We had much better players available back then.  Mellberg, Solano, Angel, Barry.  We have nobody anywhere near that class in the squad these days.  Lambert needed to add some real quality to the squad, but he risked his dosh on foreign unknowns and lower division gambles.  It doesn't look like working.

This is a red herring Risso. Saturday saw a team with Hughes and Sidwell take 3 points off us. Both heavily pilloried in the past. Neither of these players have the quality mentioned but you can still get them to perform well with the right approach. also,none of the above were mentioned at the time of Dolly as being World or International class and were generally viewed by others as good-but not great.

[Chris Smith]

If we'd won 1-0 on Saturday instead of losing nobody would be saying it was a fluke, as it was we missed chances and lost to a soft goal after defending well up to then. I accept that's not a good combination and if it's still happening in January then we should worry but for now I'm happy to give them all the benefit of the doubt. The players are having to learn how to play together on the job, but I don't get any sense that they're miles out of their depth or unhappy with Lambert's methods.

[SoccerHQ]

Very similar back then as it is now.

We weren't scoring that many goals back then either pretty much until JPA hit a great goalscoring run from December onwards (Vassell didn't even score a goal until the new year).

We were in the bottom 3 until December 15th when we beat Wolves and that sparked off the great second half of the season.

I do certainly think we'll be much better after xmas this time aswell. We will need to be as I don't think our position at xmas in the league will look very clever at all.

[Macho Man Randy Savage]

I was more confident about some of our players then than I am now. I thought Mellberg was one of the best defenders in the league and Angel had the potential to be brilliant if used properly. I remember being frustrated with Barry after he looked like he should've been playing for England under Taylor. Then again, we had to alternate between Ronny Johnsen and Dion Dublin at centre back which is probably less ideal than what we face now. There were question marks over the potential of players such as Samuel, Hitzlsperger, Whittingham and Crouch, pretty similar to those of our new signings and young players coming through.

[SoccerHQ]

We had much better players available back then.  Mellberg, Solano, Angel, Barry.  We have nobody anywhere near that class in the squad these days.  Lambert needed to add some real quality to the squad, but he risked his dosh on foreign unknowns and lower division gambles.  It doesn't look like working.

This is a red herring Risso. Saturday saw a team with Hughes and Sidwell take 3 points off us. Both heavily pilloried in the past. Neither of these players have the quality mentioned but you can still get them to perform well with the right approach. also,none of the above were mentioned at the time of Dolly as being World or International class and were generally viewed by others as good-but not great.

I quite liked Hughes when he was here. Seemed to be a bit of a scapegoat on here and he did go a bit shite at the end but thought he always had a good cross on him and set up a few goals in 05/06.

He's played really well for Fulham alongside Hangeland, infact it makes you think why the hell we didn't just play him at centre half alongside Mellberg instead of Ridgewell who was conceding a penalty every game at that point.

Sidwell is still as mediocre as ever, one of his shots on saturday nearly hit the roof!