Midfield_General

Very sad news. RIP.

Mad that anyone responsible for signing off the design could see that and think it was alright. The overall concept is great and with a tiny bit of thought it could have been a classic, but the whole design and execution of the sleeves is just so shit. I can't believe how hard they make it look to design a football kit every season. It's such a basic thing to be able to get right, half the people on here can do it perfectly well. Ah well. If we win in it no-one will care. But so near and yet so far.

I personally hope not, but yes, he could well be. Who knows though. It's still very early days and until some of the bigger sales start happening and we start to get an idea of how Still wants us to line up, it's very hard to tell.

Yeah Armstrong's the one who, if we play him in his best position coming in off the right, gives me the most confidence will get goals out of who we've currently got. I personally wouldn't read too much into his WBA loan spell because by all accounts they were playing him down the middle which anyone who's watched him enough knows he can't do. I'd definitely keep him. Stewart looks to have a bit of quality but you just feel he could break down at any time. With Archer, the jury is still totally out for me and it would be an enormous risk to rely on him to lead the line, and BBD I just think is an embarrassment and he'd be the first out of the door, regardless of whether or not he's scored a few at this level before. He's abysmal. I'd still like to think we're going to spend some proper money on an established, obvious first-choice striker. Going in with that person, Stewart, Armstrong and Downs, and getting rid of Archer and BBD would feel to me more like the behaviour of a team expecting to challenge for the league. And I agree with you about the supply being critical. Until we see how Still wants to play, who stays, who goes etc it's almost impossible to predict what the team will look like at the start of the season, but it definitely feels like there's a lot of work to be done.

The risk at the moment though is that even with Downs arriving you don't look at any of our striking options and think 'yeah he's going to be the main man to score the goals to get us promotion'. Every one of them still feels a bit 'might be alright off the bench for the last twenty minutes'. It's only the beginning of July though, so let's see where we are at the end of the window.

It’s hard to write much when you’re doing a running high five victory lap and laughing hysterically

Reports say Russ 'wants' Downes... but he ends up signing Rothwell. There could not be a more perfect illustration of the difference between the speculation on who Rangers 'want', and the pool in which they are fishing in reality.

Quite. I could definitely see deadwood like Fraser going there, because we'd almost certainly want rid and it could easily be the best (or only) offer he'd get. Which is very different to them realistically competing for much better players that other, much more well-off clubs might actually want.

Which they can't. He's a £20m-£25m player under contract until 2028. Their all-time transfer record paid is £12m, and that was 25 years ago when they were good and had money. Apparently he was also on £30k per week last season, so if goes he's going to want to increase that. He's 26 now, so he's got probably 5 years left to maximise his earning potential. No way can Rangers compete with what even the relegation bait down here would be able to offer him. It's TeamTalk. It's bollocks, just rehashing other clickbait stories that were made-up in the first place. Downes may well leave, but it 100% won't be to Rangers. It's almost as absurd as people suggesting Rangers could come in for Ramsdale. Look at who Rangers actually sign, what they pay for them and the wages they pay. It just has no basis in reality whatsoever.

https://www.manutd.com/en/players-and-staff/detail/maya-le-tissier If THB does go we should be all over that

That's weird, at Uni I flicked your girlfriend's bean while thinking of Gwen Stefani The circle of life I suppose

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.