I'm glad you saw the Leighton Baines I saw. I do get annoyed when people keep saying he's finished or he can't deliver any more. Like Rooney, Leighton has a football brain and there is no substitute for the kind of in-game intelligence that players like he and Rooney can bring to a team.

As you rightly said, he was great in that first half. All in all we have to be satisfied with 3 scrappy points against a Stoke team that was never going to make things easy for us. Looking forward to Thursday.

Having said that, still one of my favourite players, 100% not finished yet and will go for a few more years I think, so I too can not really understand why some people are writing him off.

Form is temporary. Class is permanent.

Calvert-Lewin I thought did well. He actually made a bit if a difference in the second half. Still a work in progress but he's shown enough in the U20s, preseason and this game to suggest he's got a decent career ahead of him. Hadn't really seen many signs before that.

Thought Schneiderlin was beyond woeful. Slow, almost uninterested, dull and unimaginative with the ball and couldn't do much more than foul players who were just too quick and industrious for him.

According to the official Premier League stats, Schneiderlin had the best all-around defensive game of any midfielder in the Prem yesterday – four tackles, six interceptions, seven recoveries. He was all over the field shutting down attacks and winning balls. And he only had two fouls.

Yes, he was poor with the ball, but there was a lot of that going around – we had 22 passes intercepted yesterday, which is an absolute disgrace. Schneiderlin was no worse than Gueye, Jags or Klaassen. But "beyond woeful?" Not hardly.

Masterstroke from Koeman and his team to bring him back.

Baines looks fit, his quality was there too see. Gueye had a better 2nd half as did Calvert-Lewin who is so obviously more comfortable playing centrally. Schneiderlin probably had a 100% pass completion rating pity none of them were forward. Jags and Klaassen looked terrible in the 1st half though I put that down to Koeman's mad tactics.

A win is a win we, let's hope we start to gel and also bring in a striker, some width and Ben Gibson to partner our new Rolls Royce of a centre back in Michael Keane.

No idea what a "recovery" looks like. Not a term that's in general usage is it?

If you're telling me he was no worse than Gana then I'd say it's time to ditch the stats.

It was like he was on a leash and as soon as he took no more than a couple of strides he passed sideways or backwards.

The midfield as a whole "generally" when passing sideways passed the ball half a yard "behind" the player receiving the ball which instantly meant the player was facing his own goal and another sideways or backwards pass was the easiest and nearly always the result.

Really fucking annoying and smacked of either lack of confidence or playing to a strict "safety first and foremost" regime.

Rather, over the past few seasons, the player that plays in-front of him doesn't provide cover for him, in the way Pienaar did.

Thus, Baines has to be more restrained in getting forward, or risk getting the backline exposed.

Of course, given his age, he would be wise to manage how much unnecessary running he needs to do.

I reckon, if he has comparable cover like in the days of Bainaar, he will still be devastating in bombing forward.

He is very inexperienced, but has shown in an England shirt, and with his goal at Ruzomberok, that he can score goals and can become a very good player. As always much will be down to his attitude, and I sense that is pretty good.