Midfield_General

That looked in

Missed the three keepy-uppies he did facing away from goal before overhead volleying it into the top corner! Outrageous

Good stuff from Sam Amo

Macca is all over the place

Fuck me what a goal

Lovely finish 👌

Fair enough mate, agree to disagree 👍

Glad to see that Mara has been given yet another chance to really put a shift in and bust a gut to help the team, he deserves it

What an absolute joke

For the right price he could be a good fit for us. Young but not a kid, English which we know Russ likes, played 74 times for Spurs so has decent top-level experience, and in a position we need to strengthen. Also flexible as he's a proper DM but is also very comfortable at LB. Probably considered not quite good enough to be a regular for Spurs first team, but then neither was Winks, and he's gone on to do very well. Not sure how good he is on the ball, but Spurs fans seem to think he's tidy if unspectacular and generally speak pretty well of him. Quite hope that this one has legs, as he feels like the sort of signing that is realistic, probably not ridiculous money in terms of either transfer fee or wages, has some potential upside in terms of future value, and would actually improve our first team.

PT

Best get working on that Molotov cocktail then because a fair percentage of this site still can’t get the six letters of ‘Bazunu’ right, and that’s after two years

Sorry - you saw him sign some shirts once and now you think you have more insight into his personality and impact behind the scenes than the guy who reports on Saints for a living, has done forever and knows most people inside the club? Is that right?

What has Mara contributed since then?

Absolutely spot on

So if you can see with your own eyes that Mara is absolute dogshit and not worth wasting anymore time on, you’re supporting the wrong level of team? Because we could never, ever expect to do better than him, and it’s only fair that we should wait until he’s at least 24 before we can expect any sort of meaningful return? Righto 👍

Spaffing great chunks of our limited wage bill on wastes of space like Lallana doesn’t really help either. What a contribution he’s made to our pre-season. Start as you mean to go on eh ‘Adz’. Bet he’s a really really great lad to have around the dressing room though, and that’s a great reason to pay him £60k a week or whatever the fuck we’re wasting on him that could have gone towards paying the going rate for a striker who can actually walk or a proper PL keeper.

"Now you're talking"

I’ve got a mate with an Arsenal season ticket who says that Ramsdale is excellent with his feet - that’s not why he got dropped. The main reason Arteta doesn’t fancy him is that he is slightly more error-prone than Raya now that Raya has settled down, but more specifically it’s because Ramsdale has admitted to having concentration issues when he had to go for long spells with nothing to do - which to be fair I don’t think would be quite so much of an issue if he was playing for us! He’d be an enormous upgrade for us and would fit perfectly with the way RM likes to play.

I know what you mean, and I would sort of like one of those players too, but Vic couldn't pass for shit and Martin wouldn't play a player like him in a million years. What we really need is a new Romeu. Happy to sit, get his foot in and do the dirty stuff but also totally comfortable receiving the ball in tight areas and good enough to play his way out, keep possession and pick a pass. How we find someone who can do that to the level he did, on our budget though I do not know. Romeu was absolute class.

Great minds #JusticeForMacca

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That's actually not entirely true. When Macca has the ball at his feet, isn't being put under too much pressure and has got a little bit of time to get his head up and have a look, he's actually quite capable of playing quite neat 40-50 yard passes, normally clipped over the nearest attacker to someone a bit further wide or in space in the midfield. Where he struggles is in receiving the ball. His control is poor, he's very one-footed (understandably), and he has a tendency to panic because of this. He also can't play one-touch passes or passes when he's being closed down and given less time. Rather than recognise when he's in this situation and just put his foot through it, it looks like he feels (or has been told) he has to play out at all costs, and that's when the really awful mistakes occur. So it's not playing it back to him that's the problem per se, it's about being selective and intelligent and only doing it when he's not immediately going to get closed down and put under loads of pressure. When he came back into the side at the end of last season we got quite good at making those decisions, and looked much more solid and less heart-attack-inducing at the back as a result of that.

Sorry - that was a reply to a previous post about McTominay saying we have no chance of getting him

Why? £25m asking price and apparently currently on around £60k PW. It’s not a completely outlandish idea.