egg

He didn't turn up for pre season at Everton so can't be anywhere near match fit.

Our wage bill needed to come down massively. It has, and that will hopefully stop us having to use the loan to pay the wages / bills. It doesn't give us extra buying power though, at least not until we're in a better financial state. Our model is self sufficiency. If that involves paying all transfer related expenditure from transfer sale proceeds, so be it. How much we've actually received and actually paid out are other issues. There's been talk that the Armstrong fee went up if Obafemi didn't go to Blackburn. That may be the case, and his refusal to go may have limited our buying power. All guess work, but the bottom line is I suspect that we would have loved to have spent £25m+ on a decent CB, but we've got we've got, and are spending accordingly. We see this one differently. All I hope is that Lyanco is not as shit as I fear he will be.

Yep. Nothing complicated at all, just get the ball and men up the field, ball into the box, runners supporting. Lots of pace and power in the team though, and a fair bit of skill. They're a decent team, and very well drilled. They'll surprise a few this season.

Ah, didn't realise he played tonight. Bednarek plus 1 of the other 2 then. Agree though, the 9 subs from yesterday plus 2 others ought to have enough to win.

I'd imagine that it'll be something like that. I wander if we might see Simeu alongside Bednarek.

It's about what you have left to spend out of what you sell for. If you're skint you pay the sale costs out of what you sell for, whereas the better off ones shoulder those costs. What other clubs can afford is bollox. We're not other clubs. We're the skint one. It's pretty staggering frankly that people refuse to understand that we can only afford to spend the net sale proceeds rather than the gross sale proceeds. Sure, its shit, but that's our reality.

Yep. Soyuncu doesn't get bullied too often, but he did tonight. Brilliant performance.

I understand Bertrand had covid. Vestergaard I'd imagine is unwell or injured.

You ever moved house Del? When I have, I've had to pay the pesky estate agents, and pesky lawyers, and pesky removal men. If I hadn't been able to save that cash, I'd have had to pay it out of the sale money. It's not a hard concept.

Newborn

We haven't got 20-30m for a start.

There will be an activation window (ie not before x date, and not after y date) and a minimum notice period I'd imagine.

They gave us great service, and made us a lot of money. Is that the point you're making?

I guess it's about incentive to the club getting the player on loan...where's the incentive to play and develop the player? This arrangement gives us that, all while giving him the platform to develop and the carrot of possibly going back to Chelsea if he does well. It's a genuine everyone's a winner situation if he does well.

Pretty much this. I look at it as us paying something akin to a loan fee which, plus his wages, is our maximum outlay. If the buy back clause is invoked, the fee that they give us is a kind of development fee. It's brilliant business.

It is pointless. These are stats that do not actually analyse what a keeper does, what mistakes he's made, what shots should be kept out. Analyse all of that, and there's a point to it. You can't just focus on one area of the pitch. Our LB last year created next to nothing and gave us a lopsided team; our CM created little from open play; our CM got over run often; our CB's got done for pace time and time again; our manager failed to make changes, tactically or personnel wise ; etc We were poor last year for many many reasons. Yes our GK's were shit - and we don't need stats to point out the obvious - but we wouldn't have done much better overall with a world beater in goal.

A stat that analyses a GK performance without analysing actual mistakes is utterly pointless. I'm with you on the point that we need a better keeper, but the average fan doesn't need meaningless stats to tell them that.

Cross purposes Adrian. I think McCarthy is shite - the point is that I don't need reams of stats to show that.

Does it assess each goal and someone independently analyse whether an average keeper would have kept it out? If it does, I can see the merit. Anything short of that, it's meaningless statistics. What it doesn't do is tell us that a coach and horses have driven through our midfielders and CB's and exposed the GK's time and time again. It's pretty obvious to me that if you do a better job of stopping shots, you'll get less goals, and focusing on just the keeper ignores other problems.

Dry

I'm with Duck on this. Its pony. We can see that our keepers are shit, and it's obvious to most that McCarthy is worse. We can all see that Villa, Leeds, Brighton, etc have better keepers. We can also all see that our CB's were poor. Dragged out wide Bednarek was a fish up a tree. We can see that the CB's at Villa, Leeds, Brighton, etc. are better. We don't need stats when the issues are bloody obvious to anyone who's seen us play and has half a clue about football.

I'm mystified how he does it driving back to Carlisle. Some effort.

I'm not so sure. We looked much better today with more men in the middle and less out wide.

Yep, for all his faults, Stephens stands up to be counted and likes to have a word with anyone who needs to be spoken to. Good lad.

I'm not sure about that, but he won't be happy playing second fiddle to Tino though.