verlaine1979

For the money and his age, Downs should be able to come into the Champ and look right at home. Maybe he's nervous and will settle in a game or two, but at the moment he doesn't have the first touch of a player who is going to turn into a real factor in the league.

Rogers is already far too good for Spurs.

"Shifting dead wood" and "PSR" having a strong showing on the treadmill of shitty transfer window excuses this year. But it's not too late for "just missing out on our top target", "being comfortable with the talent in the squad" and the old workhorse "unreasonable agents fees" to make a late run.

You would think that after, what... five years of expecting to but not actually shifting any deadwood that the club might have a alighted on a different strategy.

They aren't trained on either exactly. The words that are fed into them are tokenized into statistical units with no semantic value and then reassembled based on probabilities and vector relationships.

Not to be all Grandpa Simpson about it, but can we have a zero tolerance policy on referring to any Saints employee by their first name?

Not really. Didn't have any other suitors at the time and the issue was mostly whether Arsenal would let him go for a reasonable fee rather than holding out for silly money (and to some degree whether Ramsdale would be willing to dice with relegation again). But it's not as if we won against multiple other offers.

Lol the project of a) training to play in some football matches, b) playing some football matches, and c) hopefully winning some football matches? No wonder the project has become such a decisive factor in modern transfer sagas...

The funniest part of this is the idea that you can buy ANYONE from a PL first team for 10m these days.

The fundamental problem is that we're poor. Nothing else to it really.

Well we would be if we'd had good enough scouting to get the model to work. But seriously, where else are small clubs going to find an economic edge? TV money, sponsorship and billionaire owners are a wash. All you can hope for is to recruit better than anyone else and reinvest.

You can't build a financial model based on recruiting promising youngsters and putting them in the shop window if you refuse to sell when two of the biggest clubs in Europe come calling. Agents just won't let those players come here in future.

The winners like Lavia and Livramento pay for the losers. That's how investment/trading is meant to work. Our problem over the past decade was twofold. a) Our scouting was poor, so we picked fewer winners than our similarly-sized peers, b) we were cash-constrained under Gao (and presumably PSR etc. after a few disastrous big-money signings) and so couldn't take quite as many rolls of the dice on recruiting early and loaning out. For the most part we recruited on 1 in 1 out, which aren't the right odds for this model to work.

I'm imagine Fernandes is appealing because a lot of clubs assume he'll be cheap since a) we didn't pay very much for him b) he was good but performance level was probably limited vs true potential by the drag effect of playing in an historically awful team, and c) the perception that we'll have to sell because we got relegated. They probably think they can get him for double what we paid if they wait.

At last.

Didn't realize this had been moved. Bearing in mind knowledge of Stephens' new contract was already widespread, I intended my statement to be read as an ellipsis of the phrase "either of them". But I feel all this pedantry is missing the larger point that, new contract or not, they should both fuck off elsewhere.

either as opposed to both

Bednarek and Stephens both very much in the Che Adams mould of players I just want to never have to watch again. Don't care if the replacements are inferior, don't care if it's irrational, don't care if keeping them would marginally increase our chances of promotion. They are the authors of so much tedium, shame and misery over the past 5+ years that all I want is for them to fuck off and play for anyone else. If we don't lose either this summer, I will be very cross indeed.

With Quarshie, Charles and Downs in the side, we might actually have a bit of physical presence on the pitch for the first time since Lavia left.

Chief among them, you can't sell yourself as a shop-window club to young players if you refuse to sell them when someone higher up the ladder tries to buy them.

Practical criminal negligence from his agent if he didn't get a release clause.

It's just bizarre to claim that the Championship is a higher level of football than Ligue 1. The Champ is inferior on pretty much every single metric.

Even Koeman had a fairly patchy CV before he came to us, didn't he? Wasn't there a disastrous spell in Spain with a club like Valencia?

Didn't Mourinho take over at Porto 8 years after Robson left?

Two straight balls through the middle of midfield and defense.