Nordic Saint

That means Hoedt's team has conceded 23 goals in the last eight games he's played for Saints and Celta, with no clean sheets and no wins.

A free meal?

Fonte is having one of the best years of his entire career. His Lille team has won every game this year and will be in the Champions League next season while his Portugal team is in final 4 of the European Nations League.

Nice theory but in practice it's just not going to happen. The players the club will sell will be our better ones because they are the ones other clubs want. They should be able to find buyers for Bertrand, Lemina and possibly Hojbjerg in the summer. I guess the dream for the owners would be Redmond continuing his good form to bump his transfer value right up. We'll be stuck with the worst players until their contracts expire and they are released.

What I recall some people here saying at the time he left was that Spurs' had hired him to get them into the top 4 and that he had no chance of achieving that. Now the goal posts have changed and they say he has to win the league or even the Champions' League or he is a failure. I liked him as a manager when he was here and I still do. Our owner's lack of ambition drove him away. I like our current manager too but the owners' lack of ambition will probably drive him away too. That really doesn't mean we should hate them for moving on. We should appreciate what they did in their time here and understand that talented people have ambitions too. If they hadn't done a good job here, they would have been sacked like the other managers have been recently.

This is what a normal Mario Lemina season looks like: https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/mario-lemina/leistungsdaten/spieler/170934/plus/0?saison=2015

The problem is the longer Dave Watson coaches them, the worse they all get.

Fonte captained his Lille team to yet another victory today, winning 2-0 away to Guingamp, to keep them in 2nd place. They have won all eight of their games this year. Fonte is having possibly the best season of his career and looks certain to be playing in the Champions League next season, as Lille are 12 points clear of the 4th placed team, so we might see him back in this country.

Err, except we can't because they have Jamie Vardy while we have Shane Long. Anyway, in spite of the fact they have much better players than ours, Leicester are now in the bottom half of the table and may yet get dragged into the relegation battle.

I certainly don't hate Gao: in fact, I feel a bit sorry for him. Kat has taken him for every penny she could get and he is in way over his head. Over the last few months he has had to sell off most of his shares in Lander Sports cheaply in an attempt to raise enough cash to pay back the loan he took out to pay her. Kat has been utterly ruthless in her pursuit of cash and has made more money out of this football club - so far around quarter of a billion pounds - than just about any other owner in the history of football. Charging the club she owned interest for loans was plain mean and just another way she found of siphoning money out of it. There is nothing wrong with having a wealthy Chinese owner as Wolves have found out. The problem is we don't have one: https://www.forbes.com/china-billionaires/list/#tab:overall

Two very evenly matches sides.

"Celta Vigo (without suspended Hoedt) beat Sevilla 1-0 tonight." I bet they wish Hoedt had still been suspended. I wonder how much longer they'll persist with him?

That's why the club wants to move the away fans into a corner, where the acoustics are worst so they won't be heard so much. Our home support will never be heard to best effect until we have our most vocal fans in the most strategic position, directly behind the goal. There ia a very noisy away end at St Mary's, the Northam, but there is no real home end. So, our team doesn't get the home advantage that it should get, with fans behind the goal driving them on and influencing the referee.

and Vestergaard. At least Stephens challenges opposition players in the box. Vestergaard is OK at heading the ball away when he is on his own but he stayed well clear of Crouch.

I think we'll be looking at cheaper targets than Carrillo in future. At least less money will be wasted but it also means there is even less chance of them being good enough for the Premier League.

I will be surprised if the main aim in the next transfer window will be any different to the others and that is to make a profit. So, I'd expect the owners to cash in on 1 or 2 of our best players or as they see them, most saleable commodities. The manager will then be allowed to have part of the money from those player sales to build a squad just strong enough to avoid relegation. The law of diminishing returns means that will become even more difficult than it has been. The few players we could get a big fee for are headed by Bertrand, Hojbjerg and Lemina so perm any 2 from 3.

Shane long highlights video: https://vimeo.com/channels/1206853

I thought at the time we sold Rodriguez that it should have been Long who went. I'd still rather have Rodriguez in our team. He's a much better footballer and a more prolific goal scorer. He'd have been a great signing in the January window but probably out of our price range.

We didn't bring in a right back in the window because Cedric was sold, Ralph doesn't think Valery was good enough and he was kind of hoping that Stephens could fill in? No, the real reason is that Ralph asked the board to buy a new right back in the transfer window and after making well-publicized 'enquiries' for Maehle and Elabdellaoui, they didn't because the owners wouldn't let them spend the money required.

Like this. They won again, beating Nice 4-0: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/french-ligue-one/table

Gao can now fly back to China, happy in the knowledge that the club has had another profitable transfer window. He'd probably have liked more players to be sold but has been told the big sales of players like Hojbjerg will have to wait until the summer or we'll be relegated and that could lose him a lot of money in the long-term.

Very true. We wasted more than £100 million on players like Carrillo and Hoedt we are now struggling to give away. Let's hope Ralph brings some much-needed common sense to our transfer activity.

I see Gao has flown in from China. SFC is his main business now that he has sold off most of his shares in Lander Sports. Is he going to demand bigger profits from the transfer windows or sanction investment in strengthening the squad to avoid relegation? Of course, it would be great if it were the latter and we bought Che Adams and Joakim Maehle but my guess is that his main emphasis will be on making a profit in the transfer market and limiting any spending to almost nothing.

And you'd imagine he and Clyne could have a very good party. They are still as good if not better than any goalkeeper or right back we've got.

A bigger question is what are the goals of the owners? Kat has already made quarter of a billion out of the club but Gao has yet to make his pile. His major asset when he bought the club was his company, Lander Sports Development. The share price of Lander was at a peak of 21.87 yuan in June, 2016 but it has been falling ever since. At the time he bought the club, in August 2016, it had halved in value to 10.57 yuan. But, since then, in order to raise cash, presumably to pay back the loan he took out to pay Kat, he has been selling off most of his shares cheaply so now the share price is down to just 2.95 yuan and he owns only 24% of Lander. This means, that apart from the football club, he is now only worth a small fraction of what he once was. Depending on how much money he needs for his retirement, it seems likely he'll want to make money for himself out of the club. Of course, he must know, as Kat did, that the club will be worth much more if it stays in the Premier League. At the time he bought the club, it was said that his main reason was to help promote Lander Sports' ambitious football town projects in China but now he no longer owns Lander Sports, you'd have to speculate that his best way to get any return on his investment now would be to sell the club while it's still in the Premier League. The good thing is, he must know it would be a financial disaster for him if the club were relegated before he sold it.