Sheaf Saint

Looks like he's an upgrade on Djenepo at least.

Oh crap I forgot about Ings. I was referring to Carillo.

Surely worthy of his own thread now that Fabrizio Romano is reporting it's as good as done and will be a club record transfer fee. No pressure then. What do we know about him?

He's got to be better than our previous record signing!

OK fair enough. But the power still rests with the player. The transfer will only happen if the player wants to join the club that has met the release fee. Vitinha obviously doesn't and wants to join Marseille instead.

So if we meet the release clause, and another club comes along and bids 2m higher, they have to accept our offer regardless? Seems odd. And I expect the terms would differ from contract to contract. I doubt there is a universal rule covering this.

Not sure it works like that. It's more of an Ebay auction whereby you have to bid more than the starting price and the highest bidder still wins. But, as you also point out, ultimately it comes down to the player. If we were the only club to meet the release clause, but he doesn't want to come, nobody can force him to sign.

I think, for the sake of my mental health, I should keep away from this thread for the rest of the day.

Can I have this week's lottery numbers please?

The odds are obviously stacked against us, but then Sheffield Wednesday managed to knock them out of the FA cup, so stranger things have happened.

Hoedt is a superstar. But only in his own head.

Well I've been biding my time very carefully before offering any really strong opinion of Jones (apart from the very understandable knee-jerk reaction after that Forest performance), and I was all in favour of giving him a chance to prove himself worthy, but I have to say my patience is wearing very thin now. Feels like that wonder-week was a long time ago now. And when you look at it, the performance against City was obviously just a freak that we're not going to see repeated anytime soon. Before that we scraped past Palace thanks to two howlers from Guaita, and afterwards we were lucky to come up against an Everton team who are seemingly imploding even more than we are. Since then it has been normal service resumed. We had a short spell during the Villa game where we looked like we might get a goal, but then reverted to type and conceded against the run of play due again to pathetic marking and discipline from a set-piece. That's on the coaching team I'm afraid. Newcastle in the first leg last week was predictably dire, and then against Blackpool - a team struggling in the lower half of the Championship - we relied on two goals from a LB to get a lead and then tried our best to chuck it away with a horrendously dis-organised and panicked last half an hour. When we appointed him, I opined that just because he hasn't proven himself in a top league yet, doesn't mean that he doesn't have it in him to do so if given the opportunity. Well now he has been given the opportunity and everything about his whole persona screams 'lower league manager with a chip on his shoulder'. I am still of the opinion that one day he may well go on to become a moderately successful PL manager, but right now we do not have the luxury of affording him that time to learn his trade. What we needed when we sacked Ralph was for an experienced manager with decent top league pedigree who would make an instant improvement to our performances, and what we've got is the complete opposite of that. If ever someone like Jones would have been a good appointment for us, it would be after we've been relegated and he would come in to build a promotion-winning team in the Championship. From there he would have some momentum to carry forward into the PL with the squad that he coached to get there. That could work. I am now completely resigned to the fact that we are going to be relegated this season. I just don't see any encouraging signs that we are going to improve enough to get the points we need to stay up now. Yes you can point the finger at our horrific lack of quality up front. But, as Puel worked out, if your forwards aren't doing the business then make sure your defenders are and make yourself hard to beat. We're not hard to beat, despite Jones' protestations otherwise. 7 defeats in our last 8 in the league and no clean sheets - mostly against bottom half teams - shows we are actually very easy to beat. That's on the manager.

Yeah it was shocking. He slipped over and then didn't bother trying to catch up with the attacker because he just assumed it had gone out and we would get a throw in. Watch afterwards when he's going nuts at the ref, he's just deflecting blame from himself because there's no way he could possibly have seen from his position if the ball had actually gone out or not. He's obviously not familiar with the term "play to the whistle".

Bloke in the crowd at the Wrexham v Sheff Utd game holding up a cardboard FA cup with "Fuck the Tories" written on it in big letters. TV producer must have had a heart attack when he saw it. They quickly cut to a different camera 🤣

Yeah, I can't quite imagine him sitting down for a team meal and tucking into smoked tofu with quinoa! 🤣

I actually watched that game on a stream because my nephew was making his debut for Forest Green, having gone there on loan for the second half of the season. Shrewsbury were awful and didn't seriously threaten the FGR goal until the 94th minute equaliser. How they threw that game away, I will never know.

She should get Nathan Jones on as a guest at some point... Mad Nad interviews Mad Nate 😉

The last half an hour of that was a horror show. So little quality and composure against a poor opponent.

Romain Perraud, Southampton's goal machine!

It's a sorry state of affairs when you find yourself wanting your first choice keeper dropped in favour of someone who's old enough to be his dad!