Duncan Barkes

Amen to all of that.

Would just add a small note of caution though, and it's this.

According to AI, as of today, in the current 2025-26 season, Blackburn Rovers have scored just five goals from set pieces in the championship.

And although AI says that they have caught attention for their innovative and unusual corner kick routines this season, despite this tactical creativity, they are among the teams with the fewest set-piece goals in the league.

A majority of their goals this season have come from open play.

So, whilst we kept a clean sheet set pieces-wise, it seems that the team that we were playing aren't very good at set pieces, or at least not very successful at set pieces.

Or maybe by being overly creative at corners, they're depriving themselves of the good old opportunity of getting the ball in underneath the goalkeeper and seeing if you can get somebody on the other end of it, which is good old English, especially championship football, at its very best.

However...

However, let's again keep our fingers crossed.

Maybe we've got the set-piece hoodoo behind us and we will start scoring from corners more often and also outlying free kicks more often.

And perhaps even more important, defending set-pieces, in particular corner kicks, right throughout the game from start to finish.

The fact that Pompey made a number of visits to Crystal Palace to look at their youth set up and their youth team playing didn't have nothing to do with the fact that that set up is geographically very convenient compared from the point of view of getting there from Portsmouth.

Compared to a lot of other teams and Crystal Palace famously have a pretty good youth set up and will be looking for and will always be looking for opportunities to send their players in their late teens, early 20s out on loan.

in order to get them match up and also to make an assessment about their prospects playing for their first team.

I think the piece that we just heard simplified things a little bit to say that, or suggest that, John Massino and the team went up to have a look at Mustapha and came home disappointed.

with Franco Ume, I'm quite certain that they didn't want to come home empty-handed, you know, kind of did a bit of window shopping and wanted to have something gift-wrapped when they got back from their journeys.

I'm sure it's a much more complicated business than that.

And as far as attitude and discipline goes, which is the other word that I've read that Miroslav Klose has to apply,

in a negative way to Mustafa, suggests that punctuality, possibly, general attitude, his general attitude was one of the reasons why they decided to let him go back to Crystal Palace.

But that doesn't mean to say he's not a good footballer.