S-Clarke

You take some strange angles on here to 'debate' people, but this is one of the strangest. If we bring in a new first choice keeper now, the likelihood is that we start next season with two pretty decent GK's to compete for the starting spot. I'd say that's a much more healthy position to be in than having average squad players as your backups to everyone. The drop off from our first team to the squad is way too big, I'm sure the club see it. Any new player coming in will have to be confident enough in their ability to hold a place here for the foreseeable future, if they weren't and they worried about Ramsdale coming back then I wouldn't want them. The club aren't going to tell them ''you're keeping this warm until Ramsdale comes back'', they're going to say this is now your place to keep. Show us what you can do.

Wasn't he going to PSG? Would be surprised to see this one, he's well above us and Championship level.

From our POV we save on wages for a year, and we get an upfront fee as a loan, which I believe will class as direct income as it's not directly linked to any profit made on him - and he'd still be on our books as owned by us.

I'd say Bazunu is one of these 'club pet project' types, so the narrative fed to the coaching staff is to play him I'd expect. This is why clubs appoint yes men as managers, who go along with whatever they pitch. Now, I still hold out hope that Will Still isn't a yes man and he will have his own strong views on the GK situation. He doesn't strike me as stupid.

He doesn't get overcriticized at all. He's judged on pure facts over 2 full seasons with us. Season 1 - worst keeper in the PL by a margin. Season 2 - Worst keeper in the Championship by a margin, promoted in spite of. Season 3 - Injured, went on loan to a very low quality league 2nd half of the season and still struggled with similar 'expected' save stats. He was listed for loan all January, and we had no takers - only ended up at Leige because it was managed by his former youth coach @ City. Even if you take stats out of it and just look at him with your own eyes, you can quickly see that he's not a capable goal keeper at a high level. He's not physical enough, not tall enough and his wrists are not strong enough. He doesn't command and he cannot make saves, unless they are directly at him. I wanted him to do well but the bloke is done and we cannot rely on him next season. Ramsdale may come back to us next summer, sure, but we still need to take this opportunity to move on from Bazunu and McCarthy. This is now the acid test for this 'new' recruitment and club setup.

Dragan did speak about a loan deal for Ramsdale way back, something that keeps him with us, but allows him to stay in the PL. I assume this will be a rather chunky loan fee, probably more than the Bednarek sale. The benefit is that we now have time to replace him. I feared this would drag right up until the last moment, giving us no time to replace. (it still might, but tbh these sorts of things get done fairly quickly as it's just a loan)

Held MGW by gunpoint and got him to sign a new contract, whilst saying how good Mr Maranakis is for the club. (some of that may not have happened)

You'd hope so, maybe we were daft on his initial contract a year or so ago and didn't put a relegation clause in it? I guess that's one way of looking at it, it's a contract renewal to help us financially. But the 3 years still feels too long, however it's painted tbh.

I thought Fraser started well for us, bit of a worker but his quality level wasn't high and I wasn't massively for signing him as a PL side - didn't think he was good enough anymore. He's probably a decent option as a squad player, but we need to sort out that starting left wing berth. Edozie is Edozie, blind allys.com is what he specialises in. I'd personally take the cash if we were offered decent value for him. Fraser is not a starter for a team aspiring for what we're aspiring to do. So, we need a starting top quality LW - assuming Dibling and Robinson compete for the right flank. BBD on the left is a non-starter for me, he's slow, cumbersome and technically incredibly limited. In a team which will rely on width and fast transitions, he's the worst player you could ever have in that role. Sadly, we won't get any takers - so he'll be an option up front for me.

Somewhat agree, it was a signing at a time when the general quality of our transfers fell through the floor. But for £5m I still don't think we can complain too much, he was a decent enough servant at times and we paid a pittance for him, so for what he cost, what we got (200 odd apps) and a profit 8 years later - that's a decent scouting result to me. I don't think it was necessarily his fault that we signed Hoedt and Vestergaard as the 'main men', but they didn't turn out good enough which thrust Bednarek into the team when I don't think he was ever signed to be first choice.

It's been mentioned in the transfer thread too, but this seems like a decent place to merge it all into. I don't think he's a top defender, not by a long way, but for £5m initial outlay in 2018 or whenever it was, you've got to say we've got our value back on him - we're still going to make a profit on that, just about. Not sure how much Lech will get. I appreciate his time and the effort he's put in, but it feels like the right time to part ways as there are too many bad memories associated with a Saints defence including Bednarek!

If we're on about privacy VPN's, I've used Mullvad (very good, not many servers - but privacy focused). PIA is another good one. I'm currently using Nord via the NordLynx Wireguard implementation as it's lighting fast, bundled with their SmartDNS you can really hide yourself geographically.

I think that was the clause set in his contract when he signed last summer, so Porto have matched it. He's been a good servant, 8 years or whatever it's been - not the best CB at all and part of some of my most miserable days supporting this club, so it's a case of falling upwards by getting a move to Porto! It makes me wonder why we value ABK at £10m though. Seems a bit skewed.

I think that statement alone illustrates how bad our attacking wide options really are. I don't think either Fraser or BBD should be anywhere near the starting 11 of a decent outfit, I'd like to think the club don't either - but then they did offer Stephens a new deal.

And that is exactly why pre-season results mean deadly squat. We had a better pre-season last year, but we didn't win a game that mattered until November and finished the season on 12 points. I'm sure we've had seasons where we've gone and won 9-0 and such against some trash, but ended up struggling to get over the line at the start of the season. I never really read anything into pre-season results, not at this stage anyway. Even the Brighton game will probably be irrelevant as the squad will still change so much. I don't think you'll see the 'real' outfit for this season until the skates game in Sept. The squad will be up in the air until Sept, so even the start of the season needs to be treated with a little bit of tempered expectation because of that.

The media soundbites are out in force on this one aren't they. The media can't dress it up really, we know how this looks. It's an absolutely horrific decision to offer him a new deal, no iffs, no butts. We weren't losing value on a high valued player for free in the summer. We'd have had no takers this summer so we'd have kept him anyway, then let him go next year. I don't see why we've done it. He's not good enough to be the captain and first team starter for a promoted or promotion chasing team. The evidence was there last season and the season before. He might be a nice lad, good around the place - I'm not disputing that, but there's more needed than that alone (As proven by last season). I hoped we'd get ruthless this summer and stop rewarding failure and mediocrity, but alas here we are.

Why put Fernandes in a midfield 3? He's your 10. We technically don't need to sign anyone to get that 11 as you put it, but I would want a better player (Starting player) on that left side, it's a big problem area for us. Charles and Downes should be the CM's behind Fernandes. Wellington/Manning, Quarshie, Edwards and Suguwara as the back 4. Flat back 4, with extra width provided by the full backs.

And based on how the pre-season has gone, he shouldn't be anywhere near the 11. Robinson should be firmly in front of him. Edozie is another one, who has once again, failed to do anything of note which makes him look like a viable starting option for us. The wide areas really concern me as we have zero quality depth in those areas. It's no surprise we don't create much.

Doubt it. He's probably fairly behind the rest. He'll be on the bench I imagine, but I do see a opening day attack including Archer, BBD and Armstrong. On paper it should have goals at this level, but I just don't really like the makeup of it. (and I can't stand BBD)

Quarshie will automatically look good to us because of those that have gone before. We've not had this sort of athletic/powerful/quick CB for absolutely donkeys years, we've focused on footballing CB's and ignored the physical attributes required. Maybe ABK was supposed to be that sort, and he was at the start (ish), but he turned into a moron so we just have to hope Quarshie is a little more level headed. It's refreshing to see a CB with some power and pace about them, and not someone who is always running after an attacker. He's got a lot to learn, but on physical attributes alone he should be pretty regular next season.

That's sadly it in a nutshell really. There's no instinctiveness in his game, or proactiveness. He's a pure reactionary defender, he's passable in games where you're backs to the walls and you're always reacting, but when we're more 'dominant' and we need to be aware of potential breaks and such, he is an absolutely enormous liability for any team. I just wanted us to be rid of these sorts this summer. They've tarnished every season for last few years, but for some reason we keep trying the same over and over again, it's the definition of insanity really - he cannot defend in a decent team, if he plays next season we will concede stacks and stacks of goals. If we shoehorn him in for someone like Edwards, then force Edwards at right back then I'm absolutely done. Yep he's signed a new contract (ridiculous decision), but it doesn't mean he should automatically be the first name. Anything more than a squad player for us this season then we're doing it wrong and these new guys are as clueless as those before.

Yeah absolutely, that report may be rubbish, but we do have history for doing stuff like this with unwanted players, which ultimately plants ourselves into a corner because we were too greedy or deluded.

The club have a really odd view around valuing players like him. They are never going to have a future here and never play (and haven't played proper football for a year), but we are still demanding valuations in order make almost all our money back from the original transfer. It's daft. We had the same approach with Hoedt and Carillo, we had clubs interested but kept trying to ask for a fee within the margin of what we paid for them previously. No clubs were interested, obviously - and in the end we lost them for free the following year, or in the case of Hoedt (or Carillo) we had to actually pay him off. Just take 4-5mill, call it a day. Or alternatively we can drag our feet demanding an unrealistic fee, and end up with another years wage wasted, a player hanging around for 6 months who doesn't want to be here, and a much lower value player next summer anyway. I know what makes sense to me.

He does seem to be sporting a new head of hair though. Hopefully he's over his illness.

We had a zeroed-in focus on ball retention, using the flawed logic that we don't need to run lots, as we'll always have the ball - thus less fitness required. Nonsense, especially when we step up a level. As we saw, our retention approach didn't work because of the better opposition, but we were so unconditioned that we couldn't even run to keep in the game when we didn't have the ball. To be fair to Juric, he tried to install basic fitness and more aggression to our off the ball/out of possession work, but it was already a lost cause at that point and the players needed a proper pre-season foundation to recover what they've lost. Cheers Martin.