"I can't work out what the team have to do to win with the fans"

The answer to this is quite simple - win games!

Most fans don't generally care how their team is winning games. 1-0 or 6-5 - nobody cares!

If we win our next two home games, points away to Cardiff and Boro look good. If we don't win out next two home games, we are struggling.

Sen needs to find the balance between scoring goals, and not conceding them. The issue I see at the minute is that we seem to be one or the other and never both.

The good news is that a team is much more likely to win games when they're not conceding and we seem to have got that bit right now.

If we can just find a way of adding a bit of creativity in the mix, we'll do well.

Its fickle under MON we would play boring holding football and grind out a goal in the last few minutes and everyone went home happy.

Now back to the future. Svens trying to play 90 min's of decent football and the moaners arn"t happy we are still just in Sept plenty of time to start our charge to the top based on a solid if not exciting start IMO

I totally agree with you merseyside, however I don't think we'll ever continuously win games without conceding as it is a very tough thing to do and you really have to be miles above the team you're playing to be able to do this.

However, if we win by scores like 4-3, i personally couldnt care less about the 3 conceded, but I know theres people that moaned when we won games like this last season, because they weren't happy about the goals we were conceding.

Blackpool - we just need to get that balance right. I'm much more comfortable now we've stopped conceding goals as this gives us a solid platform to work from.

Sven now needs to work to maintain that solid backlogs whilst allowing us to create more chances. I think Nugent coming back will help us do this as he's much better at holding the ball up than our us strikers.

The way to get put of this league is to battle 1-0 and 2-0 victories.

I think Sven is on a journey with the team an I think he's getting it right. We are slowly correcting things that are not working. Hopefully, we can keep in touch whilst we continueto progress an ten go on a storming run when it all comes together, snatching second spot on the final day of the season.....

Yes I think and I've always thought that the Bamba Mills partnership will start coming very good eventually. Konchesky and Peltier have also been reasonably solid.

The diamond formation seems to be set and working but I feel performances from nearly all of our midfielders can be inconsistent, which is then impacting on our forwards.

Like you say I have been impressed with Nugent and I'm sure Beckford will also settle after the first 5 or 6 games - championship football is completely different to the prem, and he has gone a whole season without playing regular 90mins.

So in my opinion after a slightly shaky start I think the cogs are beginning to turn

I'm predicting us to be in 4th Place at christmas and snatch 2nd place with 1 game to spare (leeds away). I put a bet on Southampton to finish 1st at 32/1 before pre season so I'm hoping I'm onto a winner there

The improving solidity of the back four and the relative stability of the first 11 is all good news.

Two big differences last season were Naughton's effectiveness going forward and the simple fact that given 10 chances, the Yak would get 6 or7 - Beckford and Vassell probably only 3 or 4.

I am a big supporter of the diamond but I just don't think he has the balance right yet.

I can't understand why (according to Youngey) Johnson played in the deeper position. For me, he should have started in the advanced role and been replaced by King later on. I would have played Danns on the right side of midfield as he is more attack-minded than Abe.

But hey ho, we're all experts !

I've got to admit, as lazy and as frustrating as he was (Forest away was the worst), I do miss a bit of yak-action

I think the problem is that, because of the emotions involved in being a football supporter, some fans judge progression/performance exclusively on our most recent game or two.

I mentioned on another thread, that there are only a couple of teams who are in better form over the last 6 (since we adopted the diamond initially for 45 minutes and now 90).

The frustrating thing I find is that there are some opinions on the quantitative aspect of our game using qualitative measures which seems a little unfair.

Fans demanded a big improvement after Bristol. Since then we have picked up 10pts from 6 games, two points shy of the 12pts people would associate with auto-promotion form (and we would probably have this if it wasn't for bad luck against Cardiff and incompetence against Forest).

For me, there are three main views on our season:

1) 'The two loses were a blip' and deducting them from the equation we'd be P7 W3 D4 13pts. No complaints really. (quantitative)

2) 'The two loses equalled a problem'. Since, this problem has been arrested; unbeaten but still conceding - progression to unbeaten and clean sheets - next stage: unbeaten, clean sheets, scoring regularly. During this period - P6 W2 D4 [within these games we have played, in total, 4 games worth of the 'diamond', scoring 5 conceding 1; including 3 clean sheets when we have played it for the full 90] (quantitative)

3) 'Yes we are picking up wins at home and draws away with clean sheets, but we aren't playing well enough or scoring enough and/or are going to have a period where we lose again'. (qualitative). Okay, this is possible, but the fact is until we DO lose or at least stop winning at home and drawing away, this is only really conjecture and there isn't much grounding for moaning....unless one is a fan who demands winning games and scoring plenty of goals all the time.

The results of my latest survey are in and it is 100% accurate! If you don't concede any goals in any given game, then you absolutely cannot lose that game.
(however information on whether or not you will win said game requires further investigation)

"If we win our next two home games, points away to Cardiff and Boro look good. If we don't win out next two home games, we are struggling. "

If we drop points at home, then moaning about the run of results as a whole will be fair enough. But what some people seem to be doing is putting in a sustained stint of mardyarsing in advance, just in case they are cruelly deprived of the opportunity by a victory on Saturday.

Random question, have we been in the top 6 since the new owners took over?

I'm pretty sure we peaked – or rather plateaued – in February in 7th.

Thanks for the flashback fatfox. I haven't heard the expression mardyarse since I left England many years ago. A very localised expression.

I'm content about where we are at the moment - in the upper half of the table and not too far from the playoff spots. I thought we'd be OK if we were in contention for a playoff spot at Christmas - remember that's only half way through the season!

Montreal Fox: Yes, although 'mardy' can be heard (though I suspect increasingly rarely) in bits of four or maybe five counties. 'mardybum' is more restricted, and I doubt that 'mardyarse' ever stretched far outside of the Leicester city boundaries.

I never find mardy easy to 'translate' – it seems to require a whole sentence to explain it in standard English, and I don't recall ever coming across a word in the dialects of other places where I've lived that does the same job.

I have a pet theory that, when that happens, it tells you something about collective personality traits. In other words, perhaps there's something about the Leicester character that makes the word 'mardyarse' a useful one to keep handy.

I am loving the reflections on "mardy", a term I too have not heard in many years, but which was the small change of every day conversation when I was a (sometimes mardy, I guess) child in south Yorkshire, many decades ago. I don't recall the "mardyarse" elaboration (which I see cannot be hyphenated if it is to get past our censors) , so yes, perhaps that is special to Leicestershire.

We shall be calling Forest fans "nits", next....

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