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Branthwaite is brilliant - probably the best outfield player at the club (certainly the only one who'd be an automatic starter for one of the Top 2). But he's been so injury prone (which is why he's not an automatic starter for one of the Top 2) that he's really not been able to be a factor this season.

We've a small squad which hasn't been helped by AFCON. N'diaye is generally one of our most important players but he's looked dead on his feet since AFCON. We've been fortunate (in a way) that our Cup exploits have been limited to 2 dismal first time failures, so we'll only have played 40 games by the end of it all.

But the manager has a 'win now' mentality - because he's only got a short contract and we're his last gig (unless he wants to become an Allardyce-esque fire fighter - which I suspect he doesn't). That's meant he's been very adverse to changing what he thinks is his best team, both in terms of bringing in different players and also making subs during games.

Players like Alcaraz, Patterson, Aznou, Dibling, George (since January) and most criminally Rohl haven't been used enough. The Premier League is physically fierce, incredibly demanding on player's fitness and the lesson is that if you flog your older players pretty much without rest then they either get injured (Grealish) or just hit a 'wall' late in the season (Tarkowski, Gueye).

Even though they're both playing a massively higher number of games than us, there's a reason that Arsenal and City switch their teams around almost every game.

Ultimately, I'm not at all sure that any manager perming any formation or selection of our squad would have got us to 6th this season. I don't think we're quite there yet - we need one or two more matchwinners and a lot more pace in the squad. But the way it panned out, I thought the last international break probably broke any momentum we had and the majority of the players have looked leggy since Easter.






hasn't helped the situation by playing effectively the same 14 or 15 players as much as he humanly could. We've seen Rohl look fantastic in the last 2 games (and he looked promising in his