S-Clarke

It's not like Gao is going to see that money though. If we sold JWP we'd have every penny of that to reinvest, as has been the case with all transfers. And in this day and age £40m doesn't get you anything really, we certainly wouldn't be able to replace JWP with £40m and then have enough money to improve defense/goalkeeper/number 10 etc. Would be a pointless sale really. As an owner you'd probably look at selling your captain/best player as a devaluing exercise for your asset anyway.

Nah, not for the PR chaos that would cause. And 40-45m wouldn't provide us anything really. It would need to be something close to our record received fee for him to go anywhere in my opinion. Contract length, captain, PR stuff etc. Unless there is some sort of instruction put in my Gao to let him go cheap, then only City and co would be able to afford him.

£50-60m I'd have thought

10 minutes.

Villa would only have a chance of signing JWP had we been relegated. He wouldn't leave us for a club at the level we are trying to chase. If he does leave it'll be a Liverpool, Spurs, Utd sort of move. In our benefit he's not quite at the level for those clubs. Unless we get relegated, he's probably going to be a Mark Noble type for us.

I guess i've just been blinded by the stats on this one, as Perreria had more goals etc. But i take those points on his creation numbers, forgot about those.

Even that's probably a bit too far 'east' for him.

Might be a controversial view, but in Beuendia's time in the PL I don't think he did much? The Perreria guy at West Brom had more impact at this level than Beundia did in my opinion. I haven't seen any stats, but it 'felt' like that anyway. The 35m+ price tag is insanity for someone who has only really done it in the NPC. Not sure why people aren't piling over Perreria at half the price.

Give it 6 months or so and he'll be back at Bournemouth in another emotional return. He's like a homesick puppy.

Sadly, there are people being impacted - still. It's fortunate if you are able to continue in a job, have family/friends close etc - but not everyone has that. I know people who have lost jobs and even recently a couple of friends in hospitality have lost their job because they're unable to re-open fully, due to the uncertainty over the 21st - and when the 21st doesn't happen you'll end up with more staff being let go. They can't have full attendances, so they can't make their expected profits so they can't keep all their staff. Jobs are changing to home working on a permanent basis for a lot of companies. For some people that's great, for other's it's terrible because they've lost what was their only method of social interaction if they live alone. Some people have friends who have been fear-driven and still won't even step out of their houses to cross the road whilst the government continue this one foot in one foot out approach. So I don't buy that lives aren't being impacted, they still are and in a big way. Life is not back to normal for a lot of people.

Been told no to Firpo then I guess? Perraud is a great alternative though, highly rated. Good attacking left back. Leeds baulked at the price though.

I think Semedo has done ok really, Wolves fans seem to like him. Don't think he was worth that £35m fee, but he's clearly a very good PL right back imo. If Firpo is half as capable then we're sorted.

Nice move by the club, probably the least we can do really. Hopefully he can gain a career at a lower level at some point, but it is looking tough tbh.

Standard Crook trying to sound informed but not actually saying anything.

I think it was always a pipe dream to expect anything in place for this summer. We just have to do as well as we can to scrape by this summer and try, where possible, to be very clever and creative in the market with the loose change we have

She has a point though.

Conte to Spurs is an interesting one and a huge coup in my opinion. Something that could even tempt Kane to stay.

Totally different sorts of players, but the main difference is that Kane has performed consistently over a prolonged period of time. Guaranteed 20 goals a year every singe year, international goal scorer, European goal scorer. He's on a different level to Ings if we're honest. I don't agree with the £150m valuation myself, but for a player with his record and top level exposure it's probably the going price nowadays (which makes a mockery of the so called COVID football finance crash)

If we use this opportunity to provide Salisu his first team birth and then use the funds to improve on Bednarek then it's probably a win-win. Being in a defence that conceded 68 goals isn't something to ignore, all of our defenders have glaring weaknesses.

So you're saying that after a few years at West Ham, not managing to get into their team, he'll move to us? 😉

Depends how it's structured I guess, we wouldn't pay all of that in one window anyway. Spread over 3 and you're looking at around 5m euro initial outlay.

If it was me and I had a choice between West Ham and ourselves it would be an easy choice at this moment in time tbh. He'll be confident enough in himself to oust Cresswell. I guess we'll find out but if clubs like West Ham go in on the same players as ourselves then I don't really rate our chances.

I wouldn't compare him with Mount tbh, different type of player. Certainly worth comparing like for like with Phillips though, that's the one which irks me. I'm not sure why he's as highly rated as he is.

Looks like he's allowed to leave Barca on a perm deal, he has solid offers on the table (Which sound like they've been accepted by Barca) from ourselves and West Ham. I think we know how this is going to end...

But what people are trying to say is that there will always be variants, that will never stop. It won't magically stop evolving after 1 year, it will always be there. So, for that reason alone, do we continue this one foot out....one foot in...approach to life for the rest of our lives? I don't really fancy that if I'm honest. The Indian variant, in my opinion, is being blown out of all proportion. What we are seeing are increased cases because of increased testing, including self-administered testing, thus many more false positives than usual. If you test on the scale we test then you will always pickup infection rates and you will forever pickup new variants and new spikes of infection as it progresses around, it's how viruses have worked and how they have evolved throughout man kind. I'll go back to what I said before - the only stats worth listening to are deaths and hospital admissions, if they continue at the very, very, very low rates they currently are at then there is absolutely no need to restrict anything anymore and there shouldn't be any consideration about it. All this 'not enough data' line is a bit odd, how long is long enough to gather that data? It's been weeks and weeks now of this 'Indian' variant and as yet there are no spikes in the stats that matter. At the end of the day It's been almost 18 months of one foot in, one foot out, toes dipped in and dipped out, it feels like it's created a frightened culture scared to look at their own shadows. We need to live our lives and accept that every day comes with a new risk, none of us are infallible and none of us ever were. You don't catch people not driving their cars in case they hit someone or have an accident. People still eat processed foods and lots of processed meats, even due to the increased links with cancer etc. People still smoke, even though they know the risks. Every day is a risk, everything we do is a risk...but we live with it and we evolve around it. All we're doing is stopping a generation from evolving, we're stopping businesses in their traps, we're creating a generation of people who are scared to cross a road. I've lost people I know through the fear of lockdowns, being isolated and being made to stay away form friends and family and it's not nice. And on the flip side I know people have died from COVID as well, but there comes a point where the risk factors are negligible and for me it then becomes a case of the cure becoming worse than the effect.