Midfield_General

The stage is set for Fraser Forster's glorious return

My first ever game at The Dell. We win 5-1 on the opening day and our brand new striker scores three on his debut. He instantly became my hero.

Better hope Juric manages to stay in the job until Friday then 🙏

And Sulemana by the end of the day hopefully unless he somehow manages to fuck up his medical as well

He can’t stop people bidding for him though. It doesn’t sound like he’s being a dick about it, so it should hopefully be a case of only selling if we get an offer that we feel is too good to turn down. Otherwise he stays. We seem to be driving some very good deals on sales so far, and if the player’s not throwing his toys out then there’s no real pressure to sell if we don’t want to, so I’d imagine the offer would need to be nearer £25m + performance add-ons up to closer to £28-30m and maybe a sell-on to make it worthwhile. If we’re going to play a 4 at the back then I suspect the thinking might be that our starting CBs will be Stephens and Edwards, with Quarshie and Wood as back-ups. If the club and Still are comfortable with that, then I’d imagine that sort of money through the door for THB would be considered very useful to strengthen the other areas of the team that need more major surgery.

Big Saints flag right in the middle of the front row of the crowd for the Libertines at the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury right now. Rod Stewart's on next. Did someone get mixed up and think it was Ross Stewart?

You're right to be suspicious because Saintsmarching is a load of AI-created gibberish shitting out keywords for clicks. 'Mehdi Gokal' doesn't exist and if you read any of the other 'stories' written under that name you'll see that they don't even make sense. The whole site is total nonsense purely designed to harvest clickbait revenues.

Exactly this. Rohl is under contract and Chansiri is demanding £5m to release him from it from any interested club. We didn’t want him enough to pay that so looked elsewhere. Leicester are financially screwed so there’s no way they’re paying £5m to pay to get a manager out of his contract - they’ll go for a free agent. The exception being if the situation at Wednesday, where they haven’t paid their staff on time for a few months now, triggers a legal situation whereby the players and management team’s contracts become void if it happens too many times, which enables them all to walk for free, which is possible.

There's a joke open goal there, but I'm certainly not making it

The Bale / Forecast deal fiasco is the only one that really springs to mind, where we wrote off part of the overall value of the Bale deal in order to get more up front quicker because we were skint, and were somehow bullshitted into accepting the world's biggest knobhead and most inept goalkeeper as some sort of makeweight as part of that. But we were so utterly screwed financially at that point that we basically had no leverage whatsoever and were just trying to stay afloat, and Levy saw us coming and fucked us, gleefully getting rid of an awful, awful player while dressing it up as added value.

In his interview he said a defender, a striker and a creative midfielder were the three positions that had been signed off to recruit without needing to sell first. But then in the same breath he said that the defender is Quarshie. So if we are looking at an RB too I think we'll need to shift Suga or Bree first - most likely Suga I would have thought. But Solak revealed he authorised Spors to spend in three key areas, before needing to wait for player sales to fund more potential incomings. "We will have to try to find new homes for a number of our players. We have to size down to maybe 25 or 26 players," explained Solak. "We are already discussing the potential of selling players, but Johannes has three positions in which he told us we need to buy immediately. "We gave him this approval and the budget to buy these before we need to sell anything, and the first addition is a defender, Joshua Quarshie. "He's now working on a striker that he wants no matter what, that should come before we sell anybody, and we are working on a creative midfielder.

Nice one cheers

Oh right - apols, I stand corrected, I’ve missed that. Any names? Edit: Found it. Max Johnston.

I’m not sure we are looking at RBs though are we - have there been any links? We showed no interest at all in Aarons who’s just gone to Rangers on loan, would have been affordable and who we (Martin) wanted last summer. I think the club probably think we’re fine in that area for Champ level and I’d put money on either Sugawara or Bree starting the season there. With Ramsdale, he’ll obviously go which is a shame, but in the season just gone he was often the difference between just getting beaten every week, and some proper, goal-avalanche humiliations. For that reason I wish him all the best and if he goes, I hope it’s to a decent side this time and he doesn’t have to get battered every week in yet another relegation scrap, as he’s now been relegated three times and he’s better than that.

And the hits keep coming. Finally ridding ourselves of this panic-bought, Jones-era dross, and actually getting fees too by the sound of it. Thank god.

Yep. £18m+ for someone who consistently failed to make any meaningful impact at Championship level is unbelievable business. Snap their hand off and let the rebuild begin.

We released two Joshes yesterday. 50% of all releasees were called Josh. Spors out

Dirty, dirty player

Arsenal are releasing Zinedine Oulad M'Hand If his father is not a ruler called Sheikh M'Hand, then something's gone seriously wrong

Still very early days, but that’s a pretty uninspiring list. Proper bargain basement stuff. But we’ve not had any major fee-generating outgoings yet so I suspect we’ll start showing interest in ‘bigger’ players once the decent fees start coming in for THB, Downes, maybe Ramsdale (although it sounds like they’re looking for him to be a loan and stay our player), hopefully the 17m 🤣 from Atalanta for Sulemana etc. I’m not mentioning Fernandes as I’m still choosing to delude myself with the fantasy that he’s our next club legend in the making and will turn down all offers and stay to lead us back up as captain.

Just to repeat what I said on the other thread: At still only 28, he'll be a very shrewd free acquisition for someone. Superb player, superb professional and a lovely fella too. I met him in the players' lounge this season and he couldn't have been nicer, stopping to have plenty of photos with the kids, chatting to them and so forth, which was especially good of him as it was after a defeat (obviously). One of my favourite players of the last ten years. A grafter and a class act who will be sorely missed, and I wish him all the best wherever his career takes him next. Would love to see him back in some capacity in the future.

Sadly he will be a victim of the forced relocation of all current residents and businesses, because that spot is earmarked for the dedicated monorail stop for the DraganWorld MGM Grand Casino (sponsored by Castrol).

Max Aarons completes a season-long loan deal to join Martin at Rangers: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/c4gkz7d5j3zo Feels like a good signing for them. Surprised he has gone up there as I would have thought he would have had some decent offers down here, but Martin tried to sign him before (for us, last summer) so I'd imagine he will have played up that long-standing admiration to get him to sign. With KWP gone, I wonder if our apparent lack of interest indicates that we're seeing Sugawara and Bree as plenty in that position for next season, because if we were in the market for a right back, and he was affordable by the likes of Rangers, you'd have thought that we'd have been all over Aarons.

What they haven't mentioned is that it will be somewhat aggressively priced at £58,000 per pint. Need to offset the investment in the DraganWorld St Mary's Leisure Experience, Retail Park, Hotel Complex and Northam Estate Tour ™ development somehow. So get drinking - the city's ambitious infrastructure vision needs YOU 🫵

Official confirmation that KWP and Lumley have gone: https://www.southamptonfc.com/en/news/article/walker-peters-and-lumley-to-depart KWP still only 28. He'll be a very shrewd free acquisition for someone. Lovely fella too, I met him in the players' lounge this season and he couldn't have been nicer, stopping to have plenty of photos with the kids, chatting to them and so forth, especially good of him as it was after a defeat (obviously). Derrick Abu, Josh Lett, Josh McNamara and Lewis Payne have also been released.