Happy Christmas from one of the people who questioned Eddie Howe | OneFootball

I saw a comment on Saturday about those people who had dared to question Eddie Howe as now “being conspicuous by their absence.”

Funny.

Apparently, after three successive wins we have now forgotten all about the games that went beforehand.

These three wins have been against a Leicester team who have just been promoted and have been undone by PSR, a Brentford team who don’t travel well, plus an Ipswich team who again can’t compete because of PSR.

Ipswich is just another name for a club that gets promoted, can’t spend to compete, gets relegated and then has their best player(s) bought by one of the septic six.

Anyway, back to us.

And back to a couple of years ago…

It was common knowledge on The Mag and at St James’ Park that Bruno was not a no 6.

Eddie Howe and his team knew this and went out shopping.

They went shopping for a defensive midfielder but Eddie Howe “fell in love with” (his words) Sandro Tonali.

Tonali is top class and we did well to get him but he wasn’t the player Eddie was after – Eddie said this himself.

Fast forward to this season and we have a misfiring team winning games and losing games with no consistency of performance, as in my opinion, players are playing out of position.

Online, we have our best brains on the case and we struggled, although we all knew Bruno is better as an 8 and it was a 6 we needed.

So we go back in time now to Tonali’s debut. It was one of those pre-season St James’ Park weekend friendlies and he played as a 6! He looked class. He’s very quick and technically excellent.

So back to the present and Eddie Howe is a genius again as he’s played Tonali as a 6 and Bruno as an 8. Really?

Isn’t that what was supposed to happen two seasons ago?

So well done Eddie as we looked great yesterday.

However, I wonder if we can play mighty Bournemouth, Brighton, Brentford, Everton, Palace, Fulham and West Ham again now and see if we can improve on the three points out of 21 and no wins.

Imagine if we had stumbled upon this magic formation before those games.

Even with a couple of wins we would be in second place now.