Last week I asked LOM to produce a list of goals we’ve conceded that were clearly down to us trying to play out from the back. Such a list, even of one goal, never came and the truth is I cannot recall a single League goal we’ve conceded where we’ve presented the opposition with a goal through over playing in the same manner as, for example, Hull and Boro have to us.

So, on a similar score, can someone provide a list of, say, five goals we’ve conceded that were directly down to Allsop? I blamed him to an extent for the first goal on Saturday, but Sludge is right, the fact a shot went through someone’s legs always makes it harder to save. I thought he could have done better with Millwall’s recent goal against us, but Kipre was much more to blame in my book. There have been goals we’ve let in where I’ve asked the question could Allsop have done better, I mentioned in my last blog piece that his reactions seem fractionally slower than most Championship goalkeepers and he does give the impression that he’s a bit “heavy footed”, but I see little evidence to suggest these weaknesses are costing us a lot of goals.

I think some realism is needed here, last summer we were shopping in football’s equivalent of Poundland (until we found £1.5 million for Robinson from somewhere) and our manager at the time was prioritising a goalkeeper who was comfortable with the ball at his feet - I don’t believe we could have down much better than Allsop in those circumstances. People talk about him having been relegated twice, but one of those was with a Wycombe team with a tiny budget by Championship standards and the other was with a Derby team with a huge points deduction. I’ll also say on the subject of pundits that they’d be saying plenty about him if he was as bad as some in this thread make out. As for stats, I’d say goalkeeping stats are more subjective generally than they are for outfield players, it’s very much in the eye of the beholder.

I’ve defended a goalkeeper that I’d say is probably in the bottom third of any list of first choice Championship keepers mainly because I saw him described as “shit”. I’ve never seen a player in a Xity shirt who seriously justifies that description. I learned my lesson on that score quite recently when I learned that Cameron Toshack, my usual answer to the question who’s the worst City player you’ve seen (someone I would have called a shit footballer) had type one diabetes at the time he was with us.