Nordic Saint

Good post, Jeff. The endless bitterness on here about players and managers who are leaving or who have already left for pastures new just like players and managers do at every club and always have done is getting mind numbingly boring.

The same manager that some said on here had no chance of getting Spurs into the top 4? He was a very good manager for us and he's achieved more at Spurs than most of the cynics on here dreamed was possible. Les Reed's negative PR 'leaks' about the players and managers he fell out with seem to have mentally scarred some of our fans for life. Oh for the good old days when Channon, Davies and Ball went to Portsmouth and nobody thought anything of it. If you look at the careers of football players and managers they nearly all work for more than one club.

Charlie Austin is a young bloke who gets p!ssed a lot and sometimes embarrasses himself. So f---ing what? He was a product our club bought and now is about to sell. They knew what they were getting. They certainly can't be so amateur that they weren't even aware of his lifestyle, can they? For a while he was our best goal scorer. Now, he's not. I don't think he's going to be missed very much and I don't see that he has much love and devotion from our fans to miss either. That's life in the football world. There is absolutely no need for any hatred of players we are about to sell. It demeans the reputation of our fans and our club in the football world.

WTF is wrong with teenagers wanting to support our club noisily???? Isn't that what some of us, at least, used to do? Good luck to them is what I say. I hope they succeed.

The whingeing ninnies on here who are jealous of just about every other club are starting to sound like Pompey fans. F--ing man up. Let's concentrate on our own club's trophy cabinet because that's the one we want to see filled,

Just as long as he's not the Norwegian Carrillo.

Good idea.

No, an Eszett.

Ian Black was one of our best goalkeepers.

And he's never come out of his vault since. I wonder if he claims sickness benefit now with his bad back? Perhaps Watson can join him there.

Who do you think chose Hoedt and Elyounoussi and will the same person choose which players we buy this summer? Was it Les Reed's protégé, Ross Wilson? These are key questions for the club's immediate future.

They are the 16th best supported team in the J League: https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/j1-league/besucherzahlen/wettbewerb/JAP1/plus/?saison_id=2018

A pulse?

We need a goalkeeper who hasn't been coached by Dave Watson. They all start well here until his coaching takes effect. Wouldn't it be simpler, though, rather than constantly changing goalkeepers, just to change their coach?

He certainly has. What club would be stupid enough to pay £10m for Elyounoussi or Hoedt or £8m for Carrillo? We might get token fees for them of around £2m but it's more likely we won't be able to sell them at all and will have to try to find clubs to take them on loan.

Well, investment sounds so much better than debt. We have no issue with wealthy Chinese owners investing money in football: our problem is that Gao doesn't seem to have any.

"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.