S-Clarke

Exactly - as Liverpool have proven, you can line up signings before the window and complete it after 1st Jan. If it's that obvious to us and the club are so switched on scouting wise, then I'd expect a few moves in the first week. If there are no moves in the first week then sadly it's the same old nonsense.

I think people just call out what they see in front of them to be honest, the players are certainly a bunch of giver-uppers so why should we do anything else. This isn't a new thing, or something that has haunted us for 6 months, it's been years of the same complete repetitiveness and it's just become incredibly soulless.

Between us and Bournemouth for 20th. We might be able to sneak 19th, but we need to buck up soon.

Aribo by the way - WTF? I thought he was supposed to be decent, good first touch, top player in the SPL etc - but he looks inept. Not sure if it's confidence/lack of playing time or he is an absolute dud.

I think the club saw AMN as an option to cover for Romeu, but I agree they judged that wrong. I don't think it's fair to say they let him go without a replacement though, they just got the wrong sort. The lack of quality up front is the major killer for us. That's why we are where we are period. Without Broja last season we'd be gone, without Ings in the seasons prior to that we'd be gone. We didn't add anything this summer and went into the season hoping that Adams and Armstrong will score the goals. I like Adams and he's a good player for a team in the PL, but he is not a consistent goal scorer in any way. The club have had 2 years to see that before their eyes. We needed to go all out and sign an attacker in the window, but we didn't. There were players out there who could have added to us. I fail to believe Gakpo was even an option, I think it was just chatter to appease the fanbase. He was always going to be too expensive. I got a lot of confused faces on a post when I made a comment at the end of the window saying that failing to sign a striker will undo all of the good work earlier on in the window. But it has, in fact it's trashed our season and immediate future.

Well if the Brighton game had a whiff of Relegation about it, this had a full blown stench of it. Didn't play badly, missed the usual chances, gave away a sloppy goal in the 89th min to lose the game at a team we need to be competing with. It's 2005 all over again. I don't like being defeatist as I try to be positive, but this is the first time in a long time that I struggle to see a way out for us. I can't even see a glimmer. I see the same issues every week, Adams hitting the keeper with a shot, players lacking leadership to see a game out, the same weird squad selections because the team is so unbalanced and the same brain-dumb decisions by the players in our team. We might have some talented individuals, but christ they are thick as all fuck. We need to go into the January window and spend money on some Uni graduates or something, just get some common sense into the group as they are just dumb.

LB has been a vit of a scouting disaster really, we have never replaced Targett let alone Bertrand and have seemingly filled up left back with loads of young kids not ready to play, and then Perraud - and when he's injured we have little else other than to go square pegs.

There is more to it than that IMO, something has gone on since 2021. He'll be out of here in the summer I think, cut price back to Celtic or something.

I reckon AMN, with Sailsu at LB - maybe.

He's got a good attitude about him and I like his commitment, but technically he is atrocious and hampers our attack so much.

KWP - ABK - Lyanco - Salisu - AMN JWP Ely Aribo Edozie Adams

They didn't.

Probably too early to assume it's the formation as set out on the BBC website etc. Could easily have Salisu playing LB in a back 4, with AMN in CM. And then Moi, Edozie and Aribo supporting Adams. Granted, it's still utterly horrific, but I don't think he'd be as daft to go with JWP as our only CM.

It's a strange one, they've moaned for years about Gold/Sullivan not investing and Moyes has had to go and pickup cheap options like Soucek, Dawson, Bowen and Coufal which worked brilliantly. Now they've got some more backing and they've thrown upwards of £100m on a leading striker and a Brazilian international CM it's all gone tits up. Paquetta looks totally unsuited to the PL the more I watch him, looks like it's all a bit too fast for him. Adding Scammaca has upset Bowen and has removed the influence he was having. I think there is an element that some managers are better working with scraps and exceeding expectations, Moyes seems to be like that. He did it at Everton for years, turned around WHU by doing similar, but now they're spending some money he's a bit lost on how to evolve things. Weirdly Moyes would probably have worked quite well here.

My point was from the summer just gone, I saw an uptick in scouting compared to the days of Perraud/Armstrong/Lyanco etc. I like Lavia, he's going to be a star, ditto ABK - those are the levels of potential we need to be adding, as there will be profit down the line. Edozie has something about him as well and I think we'll make a profit on him in years to come. (It's a shame it has to be referenced like that, but this is how we run - ditto Brighton) The Moussa contract will always baffle me though, we have a knack of doing some good stuff and then totally undoing it with a bizarre call like Moussa and not signing a ST.

All well and good for those views on Brighton, but as we know with that approach they are always potentially 1 or 2 poor windows away from crap - if they believe their own hype. ''Oh we can replace Cacedo with a cheap option, who will develop'' etc. For clubs like Brighton and ourselves scouting like this is the holly grail, when it works it sets you up for a few years as we saw. If you then cash in on that success, as we did, but fail to adequately re-invest then the cycle will stop dead and your team will just erode because you don't have any money. It's great when it works well, but I don't think it's realistic to think it can always work out - there is an element of luck to it (and good scouting is the key to it all, which we have struggled with for a few years) I personally think our scouting from the summer went up a notch, the problem has been the hangers on from previous windows who continue to erode the overall quality of the squad.

Almost as baffling as the decision to give Theo a 2 year contract. There have been some decent decisions made at points in recent years, but those two trump all of those. Incredibly negligent for a club who pride themselves on 'never wanting to be held ransom' and 'never paying above their means'. Failed.

Faes could do a job up front for us.

Interesting! He's done more than any of those guys in la liga this season from a wide position though, when you look at his output from the last 6 months. He's still pretty young though, so will need some time to adapt (which we don't have!)

Jackson is a wide man though isn't he, so I'd expect that kind of comparison when put next to a striker. Would be more interesting to see his stats up against Moussa or Ely?

You're spot on with that, I don't like the posts calling for his head. I also agree in that this isn't a panic or cheapo fix, this is a considered appointment. None of us know if it will work out yet, but it's unfair to say he's been appointed because he's cheap and we panicked. Far from it. He wouldn't have been my choice, but someone has seen something in him so all we can do is get behind that call. Fans are the same everywhere though, it's not just PL. Managers just don't get any time, they are judged almost immediately, whereas players are just allowed to swan around for years in the hope that they will 'fulfil their potential' under 'another manager'. It's clear to me where the problem has been with us, and has been for the last 5 years - the players. The recruitment has been shit, we blew millions on players we had to give away for free and then hamstrung ourselves in the market, so we had to look at the Perrauds, Lyancos and Armstrongs of the world to get by. The summer gone was a slight change up in that, Lavia and ABK in particular are two of the more impressive players we've signed in many years - who is to say Edozie and Mara won't join that list at a later date. I do feel as if the people in charge overestimated the level of 'experienced quality' in our squad though, and the approach to go all in with young players is looking a little foolish in the immediate term. I think it's too early to judge either SR or Jones in my opinion though, things won't change over night. I do wish we'd stop scoring own goals by offering contracts to the likes of Moussa and potentially Elyounoussi in the interim though.

When you look at us and the amount of goals we concede for fun, it's easy for an outsider who doesn't watch us to come to the conclusion that we need better CB's. But weirdly that's not exactly correct, we have very capable and athletic centre backs, but poor protection in front of them which leaves them horribly exposed. It's a worry if the people closer to the club than we are think that a new CB is needed, as it suggests they are slightly oblivious to the underlying issue. If they sort out DM then we can go with the current crop of CB's we have, no problems. DM and Attack is where the money needs to go.

That 'price is important' nonsense just builds the narrative in that we 'tried' but they wanted 'too much'. They make it sound like they're doing such a good job by telling us they won't be held to ransom, but how is that going? Oh yeah, staring down the barrel of lower league football and massive financial problems. Looking after the pennies on transfers seems to have made sense. Football players are overpriced, period. Transfer fees are always inflated by the selling club, we're good at that ourselves. If we only want to pay what we feel they're worth then we will be sliding down the leagues very soon.

I agree in what you say ''stop the NJ out rubbish' as we're shooting ourselves in the foot, but you can't then say if the players are in conflict he needs to go! As I said before, a lot of these players have been failures in whatever position we put them in. We should have the power to sack a lot of them for poor performance over a prolonged period of time, but that'll never happen as the players always manage to get their way. In an extreme example, Man Utd players have done the same. That club have let the players dictate who they want the manager to be, or who they don't want him to be. Yet none of those players have pulled up any trees themselves.

It's truly inept, talk about back to earth with a bump. We had years of beating records, high finishes, unbeaten at home runs etc (through L1/Champ/PL), and overnight we turned into one of the worst home teams we've ever been. Never a middle ground supporting us. We're either amazing or downright turgid.