Outclassed City given a football lesson.

[the other bob wilson]

If Ralls is 'Bread and butter', then Gunnarson is 'Bread and Jam'. He's a far, far superior player to Ralls, and does all the donkey work that Ralls does, plus he can pass better, moves around the pitch better, and has an overall greater influence on play,

Warnock has done a wonderful job building a strong unit out of a 'mid-table' squad. I only hope that it's not the case that the players have lost all confidence in themselves, because that's exactly what it looked liked yesterday.

And yes, Captain Morrison is sorely missed..

It's our manager who calls Gunnarsson and Ralls bread and butter players and I see it as a judgment on the type of player they are, rather than how good they are.

I agree that Gunnarsson is the better of those two players, but that's not the point I was trying to address - we have six players capable of doing a job for the first team in central midfield I make it (Gunnarsson, Ralls, Bryson, Damour, Halford and Bamba) and I'd say in many ways they are all similar type of players with creativity not being a particularly strong suit in any of them.

For me, Gunnarsson is one of the best in the division at the sort of job he does for his country, while Ralls is up there with the best youngish central midfielders in the Championship and Damour has been a good signing when you consider how much he is costing us, but in many ways they are all much of a muchness in that area, hence we are nowhere near as balanced in terms of the range of basic abilities needed for a good midfielder these days as Fulham are.

[Eric the Half a Bee]

It's our manager who calls Gunnarsson and Ralls bread and butter players and I see it as a judgment on the type of player they are, rather than how good they are.

I agree that Gunnarsson is the better of those two players, but that's not the point I was trying to address - we have six players capable of doing a job for the first team in central midfield I make it (Gunnarsson, Ralls, Bryson, Damour, Halford and Bamba) and I'd say in many ways they are all similar type of players with creativity not being a particularly strong suit in any of them.

For me, Gunnarsson is one of the best in the division at the sort of job he does for his country, while Ralls is up there with the best youngish central midfielders in the Championship and Damour has been a good signing when you consider how much he is costing us, but in many ways they are all much of a muchness in that area, hence we are nowhere near as balanced in terms of the range of basic abilities needed for a good midfielder these days as Fulham are.

I've heard it mentioned that Warnock has an old-fashioned approach of players needing to win their battles first before they can play. This might explain why we have the midfielders we have. We also have an approach of getting the ball forward with minimal fuss (I'm not one who necessarily says we're a long ball side and the stats don't particularly bear that out). As a longer ball game is less accurate and requires players picking up second balls from headers (our own and from clearances), so graft and desire will be preferred to creativity in midfield.

I'm not convinced it's the best way to build for the future, but it's been successful enough so far.