Lallana's Left Peg

Don't know what the answer is myself but I'll ask the question: How on earth do we break the cycle we're in? I don't see it as being possible.

5 year deal apparently:

Of course we are ripe for the picking. So is every other team that has less resources than the club looking to buy from them. We only get tagged with this moniker as our scouting and then subsequent coaching / development blows most other clubs out of the water. As frustrating as it is, I'd rather be a club that has the big teams chasing our players every summer than a club like Sunderland or Aston Villa who spend money on turd and then have turd seasons.

We need a central midfielder (defensive, rotation) and a centre-back (starter) and we're good to go.

Saints medicals are usually done in two parts, with the second part completed 24hrs after the first after they wait for test results to come back from the hospital. Or at least, they used to.

If the player is still in Holland as has been reported, then I would imagine it will be tomorrow.

Seen some more videos of him and he seems a tidy player. Like the way he brings the team forward up the pitch but do have some concerns about what he'll be like when we don't have the ball. Still feel like we need an understudy to Wanyama, and maybe even another 'destroyer' partner for him for some games. Wanyama himself likes a card as well, and with a new central defensive partner for Fonte required I do think we need another physical presence for the centre of the park, even if he isn't an automatic starter.

Are you sure? I have read in a lot of places he extended it last summer until 2018.

One of the contributory reasons the fee could appear so low is because we are paying a lot of it up front - in part to receiving a lot of the Schneiderlin fee up front too.

There is no way Schneiderlin needed any convincing to join Man Utd, and certainly not from an 18 year old.

Man City rumoured to have been tracking Jay. I know he can't mean Liverpool because they aren't Top 4.

FFS

I think this is the departure that means the team has to evolve slightly and change the way we play. He can't necessarily be replaced, but with astute planning and recruitment we can become a better team - but will have to play a different way to do so. If we attempt to simply replace him with a like-for-like we will suffer.

Seems very low considering the calibre of teams reported to be interested in him.

They have the cash, they could have pushed through the deal any time they wanted. This was always going to be Schneiderlin's problem this summer - at the price he'd rightly command, he was never likely to be the first choice of any Champions League club. So he has to play the waiting game. Arsenal sound like they don't like the fee, and Man Utd seem to fancy someone else more. In the meantime we potentially miss out on targets but that is just unfortunate. I hope he stays but worst case could be Arsenal come back in for him late as the only interested bidder at a price well below our valuation and Morgan throws a strop.

Pretty sure Morgan has been played by them - the rumours are that they kept telling him they would get the deal sorted and now if they turned their back on it I am not sure he will be a happy bunny at all.

We didn't agree a fee until Spurs had agreed a deal and Toby was having a medical with Spurs. My belief is that we would have either had a better chance of signing Toby, or at the very least would have known earlier of his desire to go elsewhere, had we agreed a fee with Atletico in a more timely fashion which would have allowed him to sign if he wanted, or made him tell us to wait or just 'no'. Then we can move onto other targets instead of being made to look like fools.

A fee we could enforce, which enables the player to sign. That's what I typed. Not enforce the player to sign.

Not one we could enforce and enable the player to sign though.

The club would have been able to move onto other targets and I would have no complaints. I'm not saying there is a scenario where Toby would have signed. Nobody knows if one exists. I'm suggesting that our chances of signing him would have been better if we were the only club to agree a fee (or rather, the first), and that if he didn't want to sign we could have created a situation where we found this out far sooner. So personally I do not think the club are blameless based on how this played out. It's not the end of the world, we'll move on etc. But I don't agree that Saints did the best they could in the circumstance.

And we would have found out about this situation far earlier on rather than have the scenario that while the player was having his medical at Spurs we had our Manager saying he still expects the player to sign and the club were still briefing the media that we were confident of signing him. We got played and didn't do ourselves any favours whatsoever but apparently the club did absolutely nothing wrong.

And we'd have found out much sooner if we had agreed a deal with Atletico and put Toby in a position where he either signed or he didn't. Not after he had already agreed terms and was having a medical with Spurs because they agreed a fee for him.

Despite agreeing terms with the player and him being happy to join, we couldn't sign him until his loan ran out. In the meantime we took the opportunity to go back and forth with Atletico around the fee and whatever complications there were around the clause. But that loan agreement ran out at the end of June and we never ever got to the point where Toby could have come over and signed. We never had that opportunity because we were faffing about. In the meantime Levy flew over to Spain and in the course of 48hrs agreed a deal, and 48hrs later Toby is a Spurs player. If Toby's mind was made up and it was Spurs then that is all very well but we never ever got to a point where the moment we could have signed him, where Toby would have had to either say yes or no. By the time we agreed a fee he was having his medical at Spurs. We could have known one way or another the first few days in July. Not the moment Spurs swooped for the player before we gave him a chance to sign. And what is what is annoying.

Completely agree.

He is quite clearly squad fodder for being homegrown, but I guess every player backs themselves to make an impact and has faith in their own abilities to do so - whether that is misplaced or not. Delph is 25 now, so not really that young, but shouldn't be happy about being on the bench though.