verlaine1979

Is that three consecutive possessions Redmond has surrendered with a shocking touch or pass?

Davis might as well not be there - put Boufal central and let Sims have a run down the wing.

Indeed, completely ridiculous suggestion. It's not like there aren't large swathes of the city just begging to be knocked down and developed if anyone actually thought it would generate a decent return. Far more likely that borrowing to invest in a football club with (assuming PL status) large guaranteed annual revenue to pay off the debt is a good way of quickly building up a sizable asset in a comparatively stable economy.

Fortunately, every club in the PL knows that's how Arsenal do business, so we'll have already accounted for the possibility of disappointment and planned suitable alternatives, right? Right??

Notice Wilson's Telegraph piece this evening says "The final incoming fee from Van Dijk will be around £60 million due to a large sell-on clause to Celtic but that money is being made available to reinvest, even if it is likely to be spread over several transfer windows" suggesting that those hoping for a couple of big attention-grabbing January signings might wind up disappointed.

I imagine united fans were saying the same thing about the stonewall pen we got away with at Old Trafford. I don't think of us as an unlucky team this season - not a lot of decisions decisively gone against us, and not a lot of shots hitting the frame of the goal compared to past seasons. We're just slow, weak and cowardly on the ball.

This. Hoj was our best player first half, so of course he had to be taken off. Lemina has energy and can press and carry the ball, so of course he changes his mind and keeps him on the bench. Just utterly mystifying subs, which seemed to have no discernible logic in terms of strategy or shape.

Ouch, some dreadfully transparent spin in that interview. VVD stuff is obviously nonsense, but I wonder if the 'small club' rhetoric is a deliberate ploy to prepare us for the inevitable lack of additional financial investment from the new owners?

More finances? We're effectively £200m in debt. The days of us being regarded as a well-run, debt free club are over. Watford's record signing is (just) higher than ours, and Burnley aren't far behind. The VVD sale represents a pretty big windfall, but I doubt anyone already managing in the PL is looking at us as anything other than a sideways step right now (and unfortunately, like it as not, the Everton job is a lot bigger than the Saints job, so the situation with Watford and Silva isn't at all comparable).

Subtext of the Wilson tweet about getting the money up front as we plan on buying in Jan. Is this a controversial interpretation? I assumed it was commonly accepted that our debt-laden owners don't have the proverbial pot to piddle in.

New owners setting out their stall early in the first window fully under their control? Having to sell to buy certainly doesn't sound like next-level investment...

Blimey, did MP really claim that we waited too long to 'react' in his MOTD interview? Delusional to think that there's no connection between your ability to pick up two late goals and the other team already being 4-0 up...

Spurs barely played above walking pace and still managed to score five. I hope two late consolation goalkeeping errors aren't going to falsely convince anyone that they can see green shoots of progress in the last 15 minutes.

Nonsense - we played without shape or intensity today (as we have all season), and Huddersfield could've been 0-3 up before we even had a shot on goal if not for Mooy having a poor game and FF tipping one onto the bar. A team with players of almost any quality can play with energy and organisation, and when they don't, it's really only the management that's to blame.

Nice to have the buffer of a goal, but incredibly lucky that passage of play developed as Huddersfield should've had a free kick instead of our corner after the blatant shove by Stephens.

He's had bad luck with his recent injury, but he plays in a position where the truly gifted tend to break through earlier than anywhere else on the pitch. I wouldn't write him off yet, but he'll need to start having a decisive influence on games by the end of this season/early next.

Sorry, that should've said 'fund' rather than find. Would love to be wrong on this, but with a debt acquisition that the new owners struggled for the best part of a year to pull together, I doubt any additional money will be forthcoming without the sale of existing squad members. After all, if you were lending against the club right now, our risk profile has probably changed somewhat since the start of the season as we're now only one game away from the relegation places.

Probably approving the sale of VVD to find January signings.

Since all Chinese acquisitions seem to have one thing in common - huge amounts of debt - it seems fair to group them together and ask if any have been successful.

The reason no one else is doing it is presumably because it's a huge risk. The interest rates when the Glazers borrowed to buy Man U were between 14-16% per year, so if the club doesn't do as well as expected, that's a very large liability to have hanging over your head. Presumably, if the majority of your money is tied up in a non-democratic country with a fairly punitive attitude towards troublemakers, the risk seems worthwhile in a way it wouldn't to someone whose assets are already safely established in a variety of rule-of-law respecting tax havens.

My assumption has always been that buying European clubs using debt and then using club income to pay off the loans is a good way for wealthy Chinese to establish sizeable assets outside of China without getting into trouble for trying to move their money out of the country.

If JWP was being talked up as one of the best/most underrated players in the league and an essential first name on the team sheet I'd call out the absurdity of that point of view as well. It's only the fact that Davis has been so mediocre for so long, and yet received such outsized praise that prompts me to say anything at all. I've got no vendetta against him personally, and in fact thought he was pretty useful under Poch, but since the Koeman years he's been toss and it's weird that he still gets talked about as if he's one of our best players.

He was rubbish three-ish years ago when I started this thread, and he's gotten no better since. Was horrendously slow, weak and indecisive today.

Davis is getting his lunch money stolen out there.

We're in absolute disarray at the moment.