Midfield_General

Hopefully @Lighthouse - please can you oblige so we can keep this thread to transfers?

A historic cruciate injury and incidents in the past sparked by being sexist to women and refusing to wear rainbow laces in a stand against homophobia. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/may/14/toulouse-players-left-out-of-squad-after-refusal-to-offer-lgbt-support https://www.marca.com/en/football/ligue-1/2023/05/16/646354d1e2704ed5528b458b.html This should be a fun discussion 🤔🔫

Translation: Southampton targets Zakaria Aboukhlal (Toulouse) The English club Southampton, promoted to the Premier League, is working to convince Toulouse to let its Moroccan international Zakaria Aboukhlal leave. In the process of recruiting Norwegian winger Joshua King, Toulouse is being attacked on one of its players playing in the same position. TFC has indeed opened discussions with Southampton, very motivated by the idea of recruiting Zakaria Aboukhlal in the last hours of the transfer window, as explained by Foot Mercato. If nothing has been done yet, the promoted to the Premier League hopes to move quickly on the Moroccan international, still tied to the club of the Pink City for two seasons. Aboukhlal had already attracted the covetousness of British clubs last summer, notably Brighton, at a time when TFC was not necessarily opposed to the idea of parting with him, a few weeks after the controversial episode of the day against homophobia. The 2022 World Cup semi-finalist then had a very consistent start to the season (3 goals in 5 L1 matches) before suffering a cruciate ligament rupture in his right knee. He returned to competition last March.

Ah

Everton away

When's the last time we scored five away from home?

Oh I know. You can only play what's in front of you though, and with the caveats that it was against very weak opposition he was good, as were Dibling and Fernandes. We've been shite against shite opposition so many times though, that I'm taking a bit of encouragement from it.

Lallana is not my favourite person by any means but fair fucks, he was excellent when he came on. If he can stay fit, play a part and not encourage all our promising youngsters to leave then maybe over time he can still work his way back into my good books, which I'm sure will inspire him.

I would add to that: Ramsdale Sugawara THB Bednarek KWP Les Downes That's actually starting look pretty solid

Another slam dunk to add to the Alex Crook hall of fame 🤣 Absolute joker

Holy shit Incredible bit of business. Could well be our most important signing of the season.

I’ve always thought that culture-wise, Stoke beats the shit out of Florence

True. Dibden Purlieu’s just down the road, in case any of them need a new hip or fancy an all-you-can-eat carvery

On a slight tangent, I wonder if RM has had any assurances that he stays in the job even if we go down? Because it would be pretty difficult for him otherwise, buying into a transfer policy that is all about the long-term, if he thought he might still be for the chop if we do badly in the short-term.

Nice. Maybe £16m base, rising to that with add-ons? No idea, but you have to say that regardless of whether the fans think he should be given a chance in the side or not, those are pretty good numbers for a fringe player who clearly wasn’t going to be part of the plans under RM.

No idea how it’s structured, that’s just the headline figure being reported. Agree though that it’s unlikely to all be up front, hardly any deals seem to be done like that anymore, it generally seems to be done in instalments and then some add-ons

Being reported as around £16m

Fair enough mate. I don't agree but it's a game of opinions 👍

Oh well that’s that then. He wouldn’t have saved one goal in one match so therefore he’s no better than him and we shouldn’t sign him. You’re on a wind-up right? Who do you think we should sign?

Quite right, nowhere near good enough for us and certainly not an upgrade on our current options. Who do you think we should go for - Donnarumma maybe? Alisson? Neuer? Maybe get Ter Stegen as well, he'd be a good bench option if one of the others gets a knock.

‘Very good’ isn’t always a quantifiable thing though unfortunately. Worth noting that some of our biggest flops have been the players we paid the most for. Sulemana, Vestegaard, dear old Guido, Onuachu and Elyonoussi are all amongst our top 10 biggest ever signings, with Lemina, Hoedt and Djenepo not far behind. All disasters. Just paying more for a player doesn’t guarantee quality or that they’ll be a success. Not putting all our eggs in one basket is a risk mitigation strategy, although on the flip side you could also argue of course that buying cheaper players with less of a track record brings it’s own set of risks. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, basically.

Superb goal from Leeds, playing out from the back. Perfect passing move starting with the keeper.

The season we went down, when we were absolute horseshit, we still beat Chelsea home and away, drew with Arsenal home and away, drew with Man Utd away, drew with Spurs, drew with Liverpool and knocked a very decent Man City side out of the league cup. Our problem was that we were absolutely shite against everyone else. If we can make ourselves hard to beat this season then there's no reason we can't get some points against the big boys. Need to combine that with winning the games we 'ought' to win at home against the bottom 6-7 though, which we singularly failed to do last time round. And that needs to start with Forest tomorrow.

This will be the first game I've taken my nephew to so raise your game please lads, if it's rubbish tomorrow he'll end up wanting to support PSG or some shit

My guess: BBD: 7 Arma: 5 Archer: 4 Insane shock coup deadline day loan signing no-one saw coming: 25