shurlock

Give me the savvy and experience of a 37 year old Chris Perry any day.

What brings you to this neck of the woods?

He played for the last 10 mins - lets not get carried away.

Are we talking about Chris Sutton or The9?

Who says Uncle Les hasn't been hedging currency risk? In Les We Trust.

By all accounts, he's the gabonese Richard Chaplow, the hipster, rich man's cut. #richardwatch

Good news. The best pool of midfielders in the premier league just got even better.

Behave.

We won't get £80m or probably even £70m for him.

Yep, that's from the horses mouth. The journo's wording, however, is ambiguous. Chalk it down to being badly written.

Depends what the journo meant by "We understand that van Dijk told Southampton officials last May that he wanted to move on this summer". Last May as in May 2016? If so, that would be massive news as the club potentially knew he wanted to leave this summer when they offered him a new 6-year contract. Of course, the journo might have meant this May as in May 2017 and/or it might just be all bulls*t.

Not quite pal - suggest you put down the dutchie. I'm a Richardhead (wtf) and now have a brother called Richard (wtfx2) according to our special little friend, ALWAYS. Its frankly bizarre as a number of PMs have suggested to me. You don't need to be Groucho Marx or Oscar Wilde to know that if you come up with an excruciatingly bad and barely comprehensible putdown, it's probably not a good idea to double down on it

Richard? What on earth are you on about. You're getting more and more lost in your contrived insult. If Carlsberg did name calling, you'd be a half of shandy, pal.

Not decided yet where VVD ranks in the defector stakes (in part that depends on the final outcome); but agree, at the moment, Chambers is the biggest tosser of all. Happily his career has gone nowhere which can be directly attributed to moving too early.

That's right, pal, he registered three years ago precisely because he knew this day was coming. He's been working on his chant in all that time. #richardheadPMSL

True, though does VVD see it that way? All he sees is a player doing two years, then getting a move. Only the other days others were claiming that having a lengthy contract was more about protecting and advancing the club's interests than the player's interests.

Never trusted that 80's soul-glo haircut.

Very true, though doubt VVD sees it that way. Others on here claim that having plenty of time left on a contract is not in the player's interests but the club's interests.

Thing is with Mané we set a 2 year precedent - that you do well here, you can leave after that time. VVD will believe that he's as talented as Mané and he can do the same.

Exactly. If it doesn't happen in the real world, it's hard to put yourself in his shoes and confidently claim you would act differently.

Agree only to an extent - he's still been prepared to put the club in a position where he's training away from the first team and skip preseason matches (not talking about the u-23s) -crucial for someone who's been injured for six months. It's now the eve of a new season yet he doesn't seem to be in any hurry to back down. Assuming the best case scenario in which he comes in from the cold, I'd say it's at least a month before we see him in first team action. The club still needs to manage other egos in the squad and do what's right for the other CBs who have acted like professionals.

We'll never be a stepping stone to a club like Barca. Now Liverpool, that's a different story...

Frankly don't think option 2 is much better than option 1 in the grand scheme of things - VVD has ultimately succeeded in forcing through a transfer and has left the club against our wishes. That's it to a club other than Liverpool is a minor consolation and certainly not worth foregoing a higher fee if we were to sell to Liverpool. Only Option 3 is genuinely different and easier to justify taking the high ground over.

Like night follows day, they usually do pal. Jordan 'Spinner' Sibley is hard at work.

Richard head (PMSL) does irony