verlaine1979

Is Vestergaard still as good as anyone outside the top six?

We'd be winning if the object of the game was to get the ball wide to your fullbacks, but not a great deal happening after that point. Hopefully RH has seen enough to tweak the team and the advantage.

Ings completely uninvolved so far. Attack very one dimensional as a result.

Had been hoping for a more substantial squad overhaul after the club's rhetoric when we didn't sign anyone in January. That said, three players with pace and power is pretty good going, and hopefully they'll reinvigorate the spine of the team.

No player is signed with a right to be training with the first team. If RH only wants to train 22 players, he's free to send the rest to the under 23s.

Indeed, easy to forget that our last accounts still showed a profit of almost £30m. Since then we've lost some big earners, replacing with much lower-profile signings, and player trading has been pretty much cost-neutral.

I just meant the idea that there's 'no value' in the market. There's always value if your scouting is good enough - and so hopefully this last minute signing will prove!

Isn't this just a failure of scouting?

You might argue that the owner's inability to invest capital in the club at the level permitted by FFP is entirely germane to the club's finances and competitiveness.

If I were being a sophist like you, I'd point to the Macquarie loan. As it is, I'm sure you understand perfectly well why I consider a debt taken on by the owner for the sole purpose of purchasing the club as germane to the club's overall financial position.

The whole 'we don't develop players for other clubs' attitude was from a different era, when we were debt free and had a reasonable amount of financial clout compared to our size and status in the league. If the club's financial position really is as stricken as various mouthpieces insist we must believe, then we can't afford to be high-minded about using any means at our disposal to improve the squad, even if it's just temporarily.

This was *not* the rhetoric used when the club was sold. It was all about taking us to the next level - someone should have to own that, whether it was outright deceit or a subsequent change of tack.

If we don't break our investment policy and sign a CB, then I hope the club's confidence that we have a zero risk of relegation next season proves accurate. Otherwise the whole fiscal responsibility line will ring pretty hollow when revenues plummet for the sake of adding one more senior squad member.

Fantastic, so the sale to Gao has taken us forward as far as becoming the most cash-constrained non-promoted club in the league. Let the good times roll.

Our turnover to wages ratio is high, but not the highest in the league. Why are we a special case?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1557592

You genuinely believe Yoshida would be the second-best CB at every one of those teams? Madness.

I'm not disputing that he's the best we've got or questioning his attitude - just his ability compared to our stated ambition as a club. And to be honest, if we hadn't made two botched signings in Hoedt and Vestergaard, he'd still be a distant third on our list of CBs, trying his best and having a bit of pace, but still ultimately not quite being up to the task of leading a top-half PL defence.

Yoshida being 'good enough' is a real marker of how far our expectations have fallen. Once upon a time he was a very distant third in our CB ranking, and he hasn't really improved a huge amount as a player in that time.

You seem to have quite a dislike for Boufal. Is it because he isn't Northern Irish and overrated?

Also noticeable that the players who went to Macau were mostly young and thus probably less prone to jetlag (which suddenly became a real thing only from my late 20s onward).

Not sure I've heard Ings name mentioned in the commentary at all.

I'm not sure why you think a 30 page thread, most of which is people saying he's **** and should leave is 'an easy ride'. Likewise, the only reason people were defending Ramirez is that so many others were writing him off. This in itself should be instructive. In the hierarchy of football, you have those players who are self-evidently great enough to receive universal admiration; next down you have the players who are inconsistent, who attract both admirers and detractors; finally you have the great mass of cloggers whose careers are measured in a handful of moments, either positive or negative, but seldom enough to actually have a long argument over. Boufal, Ramirez and plenty of other polarising players at other clubs are all in the second category. If they were in the first, they almost certainly wouldn't be playing for us.

TAA has already got more assists in the PL than Clyne, and has probably delivered more world class crosses in one season than most full backs manage in a career. I liked Clyne and I haven't paid enough attention to know how good TAA is as a defender, but his delivery is absolutely next level.

Probably - with the last set of league-wide figures, their wage bill increased by about £40m in 2018, but their revenue only increased by £18m. Under the short term cost controls they should only have been able to increase wages by £25m in that season (revenue + the standard £7m per season uplift).