S-Clarke

If no one wants him in England though, I'm sure he'd conciser a CL club abroad. I think both of these transfers will drag until late august, and we'll be onto Meltdown v1552952 by the time anything is decided for sure.

Wouldn't shrug at that. We both get what we want.

Tadic showed his quality, the problem is that he seemed to pickup an injury and that sort of pulled him back a bit. But he's a top player in my opinion. Pelle gets stick, but he hit 16 goals this season and that's not a bad return really. More than Lukaku and co.

He only went on loan to Millwall for a bit, but I think he knew he wasn't coming back and did kind of say his goodbyes then.

Not sure why the dutch league has this stigma attached to it. Suarez bit his teeth there (pardon the pun) and he didn't turn out too bad. Depay isn't going to be bad either, and he came from there. Ruud, Bony, Van Persie, Robben, Overmars, Eriksen, Vertonghen , Vermaelen. You'll get an Altidore every now and then, but generally the standard being sent over to this league is pretty good.

If anything proves how meaningless stats are, this is it: http://hereisthecity.com/en-gb/2015/05/26/lovren-v-alderweireld-how-the-two-defenders-compared-this-season/

It's just my opinion, that's all. The club will always put an ambitious slant on it, but the truth is that it's never as straight forward as it first seems. Yep, Jay is a different example in terms of the injury...but it does show up what sort of complications can occur from knee surgery as opposed to the injury it's self. Let's just see what happens over pre-season, I'm sure they'll give him another scan and they'll be able to see how the operation went, how it's healing. Then they can put real timescales on a return, although complications can still change that.

Hopefully they only took the beta black box, as that had a few faults with it. Mistakenly churning out Forren, Mayuka, Gazzaniga.

When I get home, I'm going to make a moneyball signing on FM.

No idea, but I can't see that being possible at all, based on this sort of injury (It's worse than what Jay had). He had to have an operation, which suggested there was a tear, not just a strain or a small tear...possibly a full tear based on how he went down. I don't think you can make absolute 100% judgments until he's had another scan once the op has healed, as that will be the real guideline. But in my opinion December is very, very, very ambitious. Jay was supposed to be back by October, but that never happened. (Although, that was because he got an infection in the knee) Knee injuries are impossible to predict in most cases, but as there are often bumps and compilations along the way you can kind of be sure that it's often a very long road back to first team sport, and come back dates are often altered all the time.

I wouldn't expect to see him next season at all. He'll probably miss part of next years pre-season as well whilst slowly building himself back up again. He's on a very long road I think, which is why we need to act like we don't even have FF anymore and get a top quality GK. No one knows if he's even going to be able to come back in a good way. We can worry about competition and fighting for places when he's available for selection again, but I'd hope...if we've done our job properly...he'd be a stand-in for our new number 1 until such a time he gets a chance.

That would be a great job for him, decent sized club, good infrastructure, decent potential to push up the leagues for sure. Hope he gets a crack.

Very good info The9, thanks for that. Another reason why the EL is good for us is to boost our coefficient rating......as for example, if we did go straight into the Top 4 this season and got to play the qualifier tie, we would be up against a European mega-power. So if we can just bide our trade in the EL for a few seasons, boost our coefficient and we'll be in a better position to have a crack higher up. (Obviously, come on Arsenal..!) If we did get into the Groups, we'd be in Pot 4, so potentially a very tough group to get out of as well. When you look at the EL and the teams in it, you do feel that the CL this season would have been way too much way too soon. We'd have been bumped right out of it.

I doubt it's a ''short-list''!

Which is actually a worse injury, but oh well.

It's true, but it's still not the case that ''we're mostly'' wrong! Our record points to the fact that we know what we're up to, and whilst there will always be castoffs due to the amount you recruit at that level, we have a very high success rate compared to many others.

Probably not, but we're in a position to see a lot more mileage out of them now. Before, even a ''PL'' club was seen as a pull for our young players, i.e Bale/Theo/Ox, but now we're established in the big league....only really the top 4 can tempt them away (in fact only the top 4 could tempt most of our guys away), so they'd need to have got to a pretty top class standard to move away now. So whilst we may not see them at their absolute world best, we will get to see them develop a lot more than we would have in the past.

Not sure why you're always so negative about our academy. We're simply not mostly wrong, are we? Terrific academy.

Monday 1st June.

All out of contract. Boruc was never a long-term option here and once Fraser was brought in, he was never going to stick around.

The only issue with doing it that way is they have to go through a first round qualifier, 2nd round qualifier, 3rd round qualifier and a play off before they even enter the group stages. All starts in about a months time.

And then there was the Cesc debate....did he dive...or didn't he.

His goal at home to WHU was massive, great moment in our season and it proved to be a pivotal goal. Was very consistent in the NPC, but was found out in the PL pretty badly unfortunately.

Elia doesn't offer anything. He isn't worth a place in the squad, really isn't. He's in his last year at Bremen so they will want a fee for him, and sod paying anything for him. Whilst it's true that Djuricic hasn't had a lot of time, in the games he has played he just looks incredibly lost and ineffective, pretty on the ball which will make people sit up and go ''ooooooh'', but actually doesn't achieve much. I don't personally feel he's suited to this league - just my 2 cents. I hope we have better targets up our sleeves. And for what it's worth, the squad players for next year will be supplemented from the U21's and the Academy more so. Pointless filling up the wage bill with dross if we can promote from within.

I heard that Gundogan has said he wants to leave, last year of his contract apparently - so Dortmund are in a similar situation to ourselves. No idea where he'll end up, but that's another top CM on the market this summer. I think City are just playing a bit of hardball, I think he'll go in the end and City will replace him with Pogba. Strootman is still being linked to Man Utd, although he did have a bad injury. Vidal is the new main target on Arsenal's list going by the rumors, and Khedira will surely attract quite a few suitors. Now that Morgan has pretty much said that he will only leave for a CL club, it makes you wonder where he will end up in the end. There are lots of other top players in his position on the move. I guess it'll come down to price in the end.