The9

All fairly sensible, not sure about Pedersen though, a fair few seasons past his best and plays where one of our best players does. Right attitude though. Weiss was decent on loan at Bolton a couple of years back.

To keep Lallana out of the side or to replace the extremely effective Danny Fox at set-pieces ?

I'm considering ignoring you as you think 35-40 is middle aged. This is some achievement given some of your political trolling.

Because it's football. I'd be pretty embarrassed chanting "you're sh111t and you smell of fish" in public usually as well...

FWIW, I also think we should be trying to sign these kind of players if we DON'T go up - the team needs to continue to evolve - it'll just be a LOT harder to get them to come if we're not in the top flight.

As far as exact players go : GK : I'd love to see us sing Schmeichel, but who knows. Whoever it is has to be a good kicker and passer who makes decisions quickly. RB : I'm hoping Jack Stephens steps up, can't think of many great right backs at the moment, Richardson might be up to it. CB : I have no idea, but someone a damn sight better than Alex Pearce. LB : Hoping Shaw steps up, fairly happy with Fox, less keen on exposing Harding. RM : I want Thomas Ince or Robert Snodgrass. CM : I would kill for the only on loan and absolutely perfect fit Gylfi Sigurdsson - though Stephen Dobbie seems to be surplus to requirements at Swansea due to him too and is a class above most Championship CMs. Danny Guthrie might also like a return and to be a regular starter rather than cover, also suits our style. There is a possibility that Ward-Prowse could come through LM : Happy with Lallana with Lee and Fox as cover, would have to be a hell of a player. ST : We have Lambert, Sharp and Lee who I'm comfortable with, need to replace Connolly and probably Barnard. Not sure whether Sinclair, Seidi et al are going to come through. I dare say whichever of the bottom Prem sides who go down will have a few of "our type" who might be a good fit. I rate that Skate O'Hara, but he's probably a little injury-prone. Matt Jarvis would give Lallana a run for his money and he could always switch sides and play inverted.

I'll just repeat what I've been saying since about September : We need about 4 or 5 new players in the summer who are expected to be better than the ones we have, and then another 4-ish in the Winter. It's a constant process of evolution and improvement without impacting on the core team. For the summer : Definitely CB to challenge Fonte and Hooiveld (it won't be Jaidi and who knows about Seaborne) RM as we don't really have one regular there CM as we lack Prem experience there and Hammond stepping up would be pushing it ST with Prem experience to replace Connolly/Barnard and possibly (more likely in January) GK if Davis plays like he did last time he was in the Prem CB if Martin LB if Shaw doesn't step up RB if Stephens doesn't step up ST to replace Connolly/Barnard I'm sure someone will spout the argument that Norwich and Swansea didn't sign loads of players. They are wrong, they have both turned over at least 7 regular starters since January 2011.

Well yeah, and if people could stop parroting their pointlessly provocative, spurious and argumentative cobblers on here it would be nice too. It's now over 7 years since I last listened to Talk****e and my life is so much richer for it.

I think "anything to put the opposition at a disadvantage" is a fair point as is "it's all immature", in amongst all the other stuff of varying accuracy. The leap comes from seeing certain people's attitudes to basically every aspect of football supporting all harkening back to being thugs and acting like socially retarded idiots.

Tadanari Lee's blog seems to (dodgy translation) indicate that he had a hand injury that needed surgery, necessitating 6 weeks recovery, and that he will be fit by the middle of May, it's only the timing of the close season that means his next match will be August.

As noted, we were top of the League between scoring and 8pm when Reading kicked off. It took Sky a good couple of minutes to get the score sorted onscreen, they had it wrong for 2 reports from Dowie, even though the first one was him describing Reading having a goal disallowed and he never mentioned Forest scoring at all. If you want to know what "no life" looks like, I rewound Sky Sports News at half time to work out what had happened, because I was listening to Solent with Sky volume turned off.

Thanks to a combination of : Someone wanting to go to the match as their husband is at a stag do Someone buying me a ticket to give them someone to go with Someone paying the petrol up front to get me as far as York Someone driving me from York to Boro and back Someone else kindly giving me free overnight accommodation Someone else having a car with much better fuel consumption than mine Not going on said stag do ONLY due to being too skint to afford it I will be there. I went to Plymouth last season and did my time - and I've been to Middlesbrough three times before too, including the win in the relegation season. Otherwise I'd be watching it on the box. Even offering me free corporate tickets to Peterborough yesterday didn't make that possible !

He makes a fair point.

Excuse me, that job is taken. My Facebook status circa 7:49pm was "we're top of the League... until Reading kick off". As for the Wotsit song - don't forget it achieved its peak for Dean Lewington of MK Dons when Michail Antonio was taking him apart. Bogdan of Bolton got it at the League Cup match too, he's a proper wotsit, hair and shirt combo. There was something about a banana when we played Exeter too, IIRC. Should really be for gingers not just orange kit wearers IMHO, not that I care much.

Looking at where I think we need to improve makes this a lot more difficult. Most of my "liked" players are wide midfielders, and we only really need one right sider and some CMs. As far as pure Championship players who are owned by Championship teams who could well be in the Championship next season, I'll take Thomas Ince, Joe Bennett of Middlesbrough and Rob Green. Though I also think Robert Snodgrass, a few Reading players and maybe centre-backs Chester or Hobbs of Hull have something, Tomkins has been decent recently for West Ham, and obviously Prem reject Curtis Davies but we don't necessarily need improving there as much as some other positions. One thing I do know after Friday, I wouldn't touch Alex Pearce with a 50 ft pole, he looked APPALLING on the ball, no better than when he was struggling with Saints a few years back.

As I was saving myself for Middlesbrough (!) I was listening to Solent and watching Sky Sports News. Basically Dowie was doing the reports on Reading's game in the studio and whilst he was describing Roberts' disallowed goal for Reading, the plums at Sky put up a caption reading "Reading 0 Forest 1" - this disappeared after a couple of seconds, only to reappear the next time they cut to Dowie. Anyone with the sound down (like me) would have thought Forest were ahead for a while (and slapped something on Facebook rapidly which would have spread the misinformation). It took about 10 mins of checking the BBC website to confirm it was a load of cobblers. As far as The Bloke Behind Me idiocy... TBBM who goes absolutely spastic and yells "YES!" like we've scored every single time the ball goes near the opposition penalty area takes the biscuit somewhat. He is, however, hilarious, despite this. If you're in Block 41 Row T Seat 1050(ish), I'm talking about you. You ruddy mental. Another TBBM is the kid who thinks he's a bit hard and slags off Guly all of the time. We have a few "get it forward" thickies around too. God help us if we're in the Prem and lose a game early next season, they'll be angling for us to turn into Watford circa 1983.

Agreed re: Poyet, but really? They've got previous for being gash in April remember - they we dreadful for the last 6 weeks of last season too. Obviously they decided losing at home to Reading did for them and Poyet's a terrible manager who can't motivate. These are the kind of mental paranoid posts that we hear about from KUMB and laugh at them for being so bonkers.

We didn't have a snap sale last season after promotion. Even I don't regard £20 for a shirt we'll never wear again as a decent "investment". £10, yes, that's why I have 4 light blue shirts from the relegation season.

What makes you think there's a concourse sale ? There hasn't been one since administration.

The club didn't reduce any of last season's kit (other than a brief token 25% off the away kit with a couple of games left), and didn't sell out of the away kit anyway, so I'm not sure why people are expecting any reductions. FWIW I think it was excellent customer service from the store employee to a point, as he clearly took the opportunity to indicate to the customer that his concerns were being shared by a lot of people, to the extent that it was becoming a problem for him as an employee having to deal with it. He probably could have couched it in more flowery terms, but I suspect he delivered it in the manner in which Cortese would like it delivered, which is "Mr Revenue Stream Source, you are not important to my money-making schemes, if you don't buy it some other mug will, I change for no-one, do one."

The only reason anyone thinks we're going to screw it up is because that's the "story". West Ham scraping up is a story for the brain-dead London media, Reading maintaining their "surge" has been a focus of the FL Show for about 3 months, and Saints collapsing is about the only interesting angle you can hang off longtime frontrunners.

I'm so glad that we have people who are not even satisfied with the team being 3 points clear in the automatic promotion places with 3 games to go. As for "under Cortese's instructions", if that were the case then Cortese wouldn't have bothered appointing a manager. I don't see him communicating these "every instructions" on match days, so I can only assume Adkins is doing what he, as a professional football manager, thinks is the best course of action. Pardew didn't sign Fox, Hooiveld, Cork, Lee, Sharp, De Ridder, the promising Jack Stephens, or Chaplow. He also isn't responsible for the fit, attacking, powerful Frazer Richardson we've seen this season.

To be honest, if at the start of the season someone had offered me 2nd place in the Championship, 3 points clear of third, with a goal difference that's 3 better than the only team that could catch us with 3 games to play, one of them against a team in midtable and one against one of the bottom 3, I'd have taken their arm off.

First thing you've ever got right...

Always be true to yourself, I say.