Potts said at half and full time that despite the call for entertaining football Sam will revert to type as PL survival is what it's all about, for me some of the pre season games could have been used to try out a different and more offensive (sic) style of football, but from what I saw today we had Cole up front by himself with Nolan and Poyet 30 yards away behind him and when we did push forward nobody ran on for Cole's flick ons.

Another comment made was in Cole we have an ideal replacement for AC, IF the service is right he can win the ball in the air and lay it off, so why should we look for another type of player, the problem is apparent, the service and back up from midfield in particular the centre, our central midfield are too slow or too defensive. Potts made the comment that we need a Lampard type player in the centre to run on to balls, unfortunately we have Nolan and until Sam realises that Nolan is no longer as good as he was, we will continue to struggle as we appear to have no plan B.

Schalke are 2 weeks behind us in pre season and hit the woodwork twice, arguably if they were sharper we would have conceded and not had any plan to get back into the game.

Hmmmm?