S-Clarke

white's gone, and Chamberlin is a central midfielder. we really need decent backup for lambert, pard's has alluded to it himself.

totally. Torres would struggle to score more than 5 goals in L1 .... and alps - seriously? England would do us comfortably, why is this even a debate? it's mental.

as much as their rise is fantastic, it shows how drastic our drop has been. Pleased for them, they deserve it, but can't quite get my head around watching us play dagenham and redbridge in a league game...

lol nice to see we're ready for our quarter final penalty shoot-out.

tbf that ball did just bounce up as he went to hit it.

lol nice one Claridge - totally going up in my estimations.

i wasn't referring to the academy as such, but in the last few years we have missed out on some real good gems in the lower leagues, simply because our scouting has not been good enough. (coupled with a lack of money)

it's not realy embarrasing. it's idle speculation when there isn't too much else going on. it's not causing anyone a problem even if it could be a load of rubbish. lighten up!

good spot, prior to previous season ticket annoucements the ticket system has always been taken offline for a little bit.

Good player, wouldn't suprise me. We've been after him for almost a year and we must have scouted him all last season.

they did have a good acadamy (and probably still do), bringing through the likes of Johnson, Onouha, Richards, Wiess etc... but i think they can kind of see their work being sidelined, with the first team just being assembled from europes best.

To me it looks like NC is trying to model us on barca. We'll never be as big or as famous, but we're following the same methods they have followed for years.

We're going to be in such a good position in a couple of years once this structure bears fruit. I know i'm probably not the only one that's been frustrated at clubs like Wolves getting good players like Kightly from nowhere....and we're left with the ryan smith's of the world. that will be totally different now, we'll be one of the first clubs in the queue for the best young talent.

the article states that we'll have to come to an agreement with the greek club too. Similar to what happened with the Punchon deal (as his mk don's loan was cut short)

http://www.soccer365.com/english_premiership/story_26510195119.php another link, this was from y/day. (it's good that they still class us in the premiership section of their site!)

tbf since the end of the season, this forum has been crying out for a classic speculation thread like this. makes things more interesting.

cheers. not sure what to make of this - obviously some contact has been made and pard's did say we appointed a few european scouts last summer, so we're obviously aware of players avaliability.

i'm sure it doesn't work like that. Agents will make a player aware that a club is poised to make a bid. clubs usually sound out an agent prior to making an official bid (ok, it may be classed as tapping up but it happens everywhere)

i may be being blind, but can you post a link to the Portuguese reports? i cannot find a thing other than the tribal football story.

The Adu link does seem too good to be true, but then so did the link to Lambert/Fonte..... NC's contacts do seem to stretch far into europe though...

We need 2 RB's, both of equal quality. Francis was one of the best players in their team on the last day of the season IMO.

shame, we missed out on a goodun there. i guess we're aiming higher than him

It's a great story and still shows that success can be achieved without having to spend great sums of money. Looking back on it now, it really does make a bit of a mockery of burley's efforts.

according to Meridan, Pardew is being considered/linked to the new managers job. The best they will be able to do is promote from within.

good replacement for papa/antonio if true, if i remember he's full of pace?