The9

This is not news. We do however have the backing of a legacy worth £2.5bn which would make cash flow for this sort of thing a little easier. All the talk of sustainability has been utter nonsense since day one, and we've always been happy to splash on players to motor us through the divisions. I had assumed the end goal might be sustainability from 2013/14s Prem prize money, but it looks like we actually are considering a tilt on Europe. Better buy some centre backs, goalkeeper, left back, defensive midfielder and another striker soon though.

Probably best not comment at all then.

What, we've bought him on a one month non-contract basis ?

Yeah, because we've got a non-existent owner who's only pretending to have some money / an owner who's about to get locked up or have their assets seized, etc.

That was ONE sentence. PS I'm not biting on this one. Much.

Looking forward to finding out - especially if it's on Sky.

First thing I found out about him. I'd prefer a pie in a tin myself. My wife had no idea what I was talking about, very much of 1986, the Fray Bentos pie-in-tin.

Impressive as I wasn't even online 5 minutes ago !

Like I just said, they've agreed a deal, and he's headed for Southampton to agree terms. Tell them to turn their phones off.

You're still wrong though. The "Michael Fish no hurricane" storm was not 1986, as indicated by this YouTube video entitled "BBC weather blooper by Michael Fish storm of 1987".

Good luck to them if we've agreed a fee and he's with us this morning...

Seriously, we're getting about £40m prize money (£60m for coming last from next year), yet we persist with trivial fan-annoying measures like admin fees and parking charges for more than 15 minutes. That's the bit that drives me mental, there's no logic to it.

Need to sign anyone by noon for them to be eligible for Sunday (not that we usually do things like that).

If we assume Adkins' comfort zone is dealing with under 27s with potential we're still fine. Dunno what his Spanish is like but his Japanese seems to be ok...

Uruguay were dirty as hell at the World Cup. Ask Strachan... Thought the big storm (if you mean the Michael Fish one) was later than that.

I, unlike most others, remain convinced that we've got free reign on the Liebherr billions and are just being sensible at the way we step up. It seems like every time there's any doubt we sign someone impressive who you'd expect to take us up a level. Last year it was Cork, then Tadanari Lee. Now... could well be Ramirez. There's a media requirement thing for all Prem clubs later today apparently... basically 20 press conferences. We may hope to unveil then.

Welcome to 1986.

I think you're probably right, but we all knew/hoped there would be a time when we stopped signing English kids he could develop and started signing potential world stars. Or random young Uruguayans who looked good at the Olympics for a start... Trying to remain sensible about this, but a bit excited if it happens. Can we get Lens too?

Sensible move, waiting until the end of the window before flinging our cash around. Exciting possibilities, which is a bit mad because I had no idea who he was yesterday. Lots of people getting carried away, but that's ok... I wonder if we're going for Phillips as well. If Ramirez signs we can play Lallana on the left again if needs be. Anyway, keen on us signing him, he looks decent, costs loads and has marquee potential. I wonder if this is the end of our "sensible potential" policy and Adkins will start to be out of his comfort zone?

If he's got dual Italian citizenship he doesn't need one. For some reason I've vaguely recalled that being the case from his Wiki. Hang on... EDIT : Nah, I made it up apparently, but same goes if he's got a Spanish passport...

I am confused by even being considered in this equation.

Probably because the average of 3 was more like 5 one night and one the next... as a 26 year old I could recover. I had a few Southport-based escapades before the project started - we had a project roll out send-off during which I helped hoover up the bottles of wine left on the table, then when we went to a bar over the road (apparently) knocked my pint all over the project boss's jacket, had no recollection of anything after 10:30pm, was walked back to the hotel by my 6 colleagues, two of whom had been chucked out of an otherwise empty bar for dancing around with their shirts off (no recall of that either of course). This was a Thursday night, was in the office the next day. Got an alarm phone call at 8:30am for breakfast, woke up fully dressed but barefoot, found the loo roll wrapped around my foot saturated with blood, the sink full of cubes of glass from a tumbler, the floor covered in both blood and glass, the bath full of sick and gradually pieced together what getting back to the room. We had to pick up company cars for the roll-out that morning, mine stayed in the car park until 2pm due to my obvious intoxication. It wasn't a problem though, I was conscious I was drinking a lot and the reasons (being away and in company and with nothing else to do but go to the bar with a healthy daily subsistence allowance), I didn't HAVE to do it and proved it by stopping if I ever started worrying about it.

I shall now expect alpine to refer to you as Mr Look-At-Me-I-Know-Whose-Flag-It-Is.

Also, there are very few out of contract players in January, but loads of them in July, so plenty of Bosmans in early July (free to negotiate for the previous 6 months) and that would skew the figures away from deadline day in the summer window.

No, they're paid by all the overseas tv companies now we're in the Prem.