Verbal Kint

"Proven quality at the highest level" costs big money and big wages. We aren't a big enough club to go around paying players 50-60k a week at the moment. Sad fact of life

Wait until the day of the game. The mugs will steam into City at short prices and the margins will be more competitive. You'll probably get at least 20s and there will likely be a mad day of introductory offers for the first game of the season

I think he's a bit average to be honest. He looked very solid for Birmingham in possibly the most negative premier league team ever. It was 11 men behind the ball, defend very deep so that teams couldn't get in behind them and get Dann and Johnson to head balls away all day long. He then goes to Blackburn who were much more attack minded and got badly shown up at times i think, although the atmosphere there last season can't have helped. I'm not a big fan of signing centre halves who have suffered two relegations in the previous two seasons. His confidence must be shot to pieces

Lallana has played in the midfield 3 for both games so far according to the team sheets on the official site. Think it will be more of 4-2-3-1 with Morgan and Davis/Cork as the two with lallana playing in behind the striker. Be interesting to see how often we play Rodriguez and Lambert together. On the face of it they're fairly similar players...

Turkish is right - mongboard

Ha ha. Sickening?

It's not the buying of the shirt or the design of it. Anybody prepared to spend hours on a sunday morning queuing to get it when they could walk in in a few days and get it in 5 mins, or even just order it online, is a bit mental IMO

Absolute mongs

Probably about 4 mill or so up front, a fee for if we stay up, a fee if we finish in top 10 for example, another fee for 50 appearances, for 20 goals, for 10 England appearances and so on and so on. Butland will be slightly different. Birmingham are absolutely desperate for cash and they won't be able to reject a decent offer. The fact it was rejected tells you that very little of that 6 million is being offered up front. If it was, they would have accepted it

Do you seriously think we've offered 6 million up front? And that if we have Birmingham, a club with massive financial problems, have rejected it? It's the same scenario as the Rodriguez deal. We've probably offered a million now and all the rest is dependent on appearances for us and England, in the same way we probably only paid about 3 or 4 million for Rodriguez up front with the rest in add-ons. If we end up paying the full fee for either of them then they would have been worth every penny...

From the CVA proposal: "13 On appointment the playing staff had a net book value of £7.1m. Three players have been realised during the administration at an aggregate value of £1.6m. These realisations have been included in the trading account for the administration. The transfer value of the remaining players is uncertain. These assets will be excluded from a CVA. On a liquidation the playing contracts revert back to the League." Last sentence says it all surely?

They should use it to pay off their debts to the local charities. But they won't. Any chance to proclaim themselves the bestest will win the day, and the deluded ****s will vote for the statue. No need to rig it

I'm odds-on that gets sung...

Been obvious from the outset that he has a Burnley source rather than a Saints one. It wouldn't have been in our interests to leak that we had had an offer accepted. Since then he hasn't had a clue

"Given his resources". 7th or 8th highest wage bill consistently over the last few years. They finish where they should be finishing.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2032533/Mikel-Arteta-admits-Arsenal-good-turn-down.html http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sport/football/3787233/Mikel-Arteta-takes-pay-cut-to-join-Arsenal.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/18324116

Malaga could offer him bigger wages. So would QPR considering what they are paying Joey Barton

The same Everton that were paying Mikel Arteta the best part of 80k a week no that long ago? The guy had to take a pay cut to join Arsenal... There's a reason Everton haven't been able to spend big money consistently on transfer fees over the last 6 or 7 years: They pay huge wages instead.

Which of those would you consider to be pacy? All of them played in a front two for the vast majority of their career so they would be considered strikers. Those were the players off the top of my head after thinking for a couple of minutes. I could probably come up with a few more if i had the time. Pace is undoubtedly a big part of the game these days, and it's vital that a team is able to inject some pace, particularly on the counter attack, but that doesn't mean a player HAS to be pacy for him to make it as a premier league striker. Thankfully being able to use your brain (in a football sense) also plays an equally, if not moreso, vital role and Ricky has far more of that than a lot of players playing in the Prem these days. I don't know for sure how many he'll score next season, but i'd have a bet he gets double figures and far more importantly will be fundamental to the way the team plays as a whole. He's our main man and a leader on the pitch.

And here is the clincher.... Alan Shearer. Perhaps the greatest of them all and was scoring goals for fun in his later years even when he was as slow as Lloyd James. There is more to being a top class striker than just having pace. Lambert has just got "it" in his brain, and that will count for a lot

Dennis Bergkamp Matt Le Tissier Eric Cantona Mark Hughes Paulo Di Canio Peter Crouch Teddy Sheringham Dimitar Berbatov Duncan Ferguson John Hartson Dion Dublin Grant Holt Niall Quinn Mark Viduka Eidur Gudjohnson Kevin Davies Uwe Rosler Bobby Zamora All have scored goals in the Prem over the years and none of them relied on pace to do so, and some on that list are some of the greatest prem strikers ever...

I can see us playing Lambert up front on his own and Lallana in behind quite a lot next season. It's Lallana's most natural position i think

13/2 with stan james for adkins not to be in charge on the final day of the season could be a massive price...

Le Saux played there. To be fair the problem when we were relegated wasn't due to our firepower. As you pointed out we had a very good group of strikers at that time and we had no problem scoring goals. The reason we went down was due to a back four of Delap, Davenport, Jacobsson and Bernard. Abysmal defending that season

Just playing devil's advocate a little here, as i tend to agree with you, but if you've got a successful side (and i mean successful in the sense of champions league qualification i.e. spurs) then you might get enough people coming from surrounding areas to justify it. I've never understood the attendance debates on here. The more success you have on the pitch, the more people will want to come and watch. So far we've seen that a mid table team with a decent cup run generates pretty much sold out games every week at St. Mary's. The year after we got to the cup final we averaged 31,700 and our lowest attendance was 30,500, which is still about 95% of capacity. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to be thinking if we were regularly in the top 8 we could justify at least a 40k stadium. Beyond that, nobody knows what the potential fan base is, because we've never had a chance to find out