Nordic Saint

"Fonte's influence as well as his ability has given the team a watertight platform" https://www.ligue1.com/ligue1/article/lille-from-relegation-strugglers-to-runners-up.htm https://www.dreamteamfc.com/c/news-gossip/447661/lille-ligue-1-champions-league/

And Fonte at Lille, who qualified for the Champions League, by finishing runners-up to PSG, with he best defensive record in the league.

I'm not sure they could afford one. They're a Greek league team. They get most of their players on free transfers or for a few hundred thousand. The biggest fee they paid for a player last year was 2 mill.

Dael Fry would be a much better buy. He is the best central defender in the Championship but on the downside he got badly injured towards the end of the season.

We'll probably swap him for one of their Moroccan Norwegians. We're rumoured to be interested in Omar Elabdellaoui. The other one, Tarik Elyounoussi, has been on loan to Qarabağ, so they might try to offload him onto us as well.

Will Ross learn from his mistakes or is he just someone who is not very good at spotting talented footballers, unsuited to the job he is in? With the money spent on players like Hoedt, Carrillo, Lemina and Elyounoussi, we could have built a decent top 8 team like we did when Paul Mitchell was doing the recruiting.

He reminds me of Tony Adams, who made his Arsenal first team debut at 17. He is physically very commanding, reads the game well and he's a good passer. But, normally, central defenders peak in their late 20s, so he has a long way to go. Maybe he'll get a chance in a League Cup game in the next year or two?

Christoph Klarer is still only 18 and already he looks like the most talented central defender at the club.

I just had a look at his stats and he wasn't. He played the full 90 minutes in just 5 league games and spent a lot of time injured or on the bench. https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/jordy-clasie/leistungsdaten/spieler/104223/plus/0?saison=2015 The following season was even worse and he played the full 90 minutes in just 3 league games. https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/jordy-clasie/leistungsdaten/spieler/104223/plus/0?saison=2016 He even failed in the Belgium league, which is nowhere near Premier League standard. Time to forget him and move on.

But, can he survive the Dave Watson effect? Liker Gazzaniga, he probably need to get away from Watson to save his career.

Every new keeper who arrives here is until Dave Watson gets to work on them. I remember how good Forster and McCarthy used to be.

The hatred of Liverpool and the players we sell to them is weird. For as long as I can remember, Liverpool and Man United have been the flagship clubs of English football and two of the greatest football clubs in the world. Any player would aspire to play for them. Meanwhile, we find so-called English football fans on here hoping they'll get injured or make mistakes and supporting Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch and any other foreign club which plays against them. It's the first time in history that any nation has provided all four clubs in the two major European finals. This may well be the greatest era ever for English football and our club has at least played a small part in it. As for van Dijk, Mane, Wanyama etc, anyone who believes our club didn't always plan to sell them is deluded. To our club's owners and directors, they were never viewed as more than commodities to be bought and sold for a profit.

It makes you wonder why anyone would buy Elyounoussi after watching him play. It appears that Ross is no more astute at spotting good players than the average man in the street, In fact, he may be worse. Hopefully, Ralph will choose the transfer targets in the summer.

The delay of the sale to Liverpool was only because Gao wouldn't let Kat sell any more players until after he took over. She wouldn't have got Gao's money if she'd sold van Dijk in the summer as originally planned. As always, Old Les put a PR spin on the delay.

Basically, the Champions League Final is going to be played by a lot of players spotted by Paul Mitchell.

Also, coincidentally, ten years before we did the same, Bolton had 4 consecutive top 8 finishes in the Premier League followed by a few seasons of relegation struggle.

Martin Braithwaite, the loanee striker from Middlesborough who's replaced Carrillo, has scored a few goals since he arrived in January. Pellegrino has done a fantastic job at Leganes, taking them to the highest league position in the club's history (they've never finished higher than 17th before so 9th place is remarkable for such a small club).

Christopher Schindler is a class above the rest of the Huddersfield players and would shine in a better team. He was captain of his team in the Bundesliga and would make an ideal replacement for Fonte as the leader of our defence. He's also good at those last ditch interceptions Fonte used to do for us, which stopped so many goals.

And he's there now.

It becomes more and more apparent that the man largely responsible for our success was Paul Mitchell, not Les Reed.

Perhaps Cortese and Pochettino's ambition to at least get us into the Champions League wasn't so unrealistic after all? Paul Mitchell and Jose Fonte are achieving that with RB Leipzig and Lille now.

Ex-Saints rule Europe! Tadic, Wanyama, van Dijk, Mané, Alderweireld.... all through to the final 4. You could almost put a World XI together with the players we've sold.

To be fair, most clubs would be happy with drawing 1-1 with Real Madrid, especially one as small as Leganés.

Pellegrino has done a fantastic job there. They are on course for the highest league finish in their history.

Jose Fonte scored one of the goals as his Lille team beat Paris St Germain 5-1 to secure their Champions League place. What an inspirational captain he is. https://www.facebook.com/F6NTE/photos/a.1554182424812390/2374086399488651/?type=3&theater