Lighthouse

We'll struggle to get £10m for those players combined, I'd say three or four of them will end up as loans. Their wages are the real, real issue, we simply cannot afford to have them on the wage bill come September.

He said what he had to in order to get the best money possible for the players we sell. If he’d said what you suggested it’d probably have knocked a couple of million off the Charles and potential THB fees. It was mooted by one of the local journalists, I forget who, that we’d need a net transfer surplus of around £50m to conform with PSR this year.

I think you may have taken his interview a little bit too literally. He was hardly going to come out and say, "yeah we’ll probably have to sell two of our better players to balance out the wages vs. Income from not getting promoted." That unfortunately is the reality of the situation.

I think you’re going to be disappointed TBH, Championship defenders don’t tend to go for deals touching on £35m. It’s far more likely that the add ons will take us into £25m territory, maybe close to £30m at the top end, but I wouldn’t expect more.

We can if they’re worth a lot of money, which is needed to balance the books.

There’re plenty of negative comments because in the two competitive games he’s played for us he has been poor and nobody is really sure if he fits into our team. Nobody is writing him off, he may come good.

This squad should be top four, even with the points deduction. There's absolutely no way I'd be happy finishing seventh with the players we have available. For reference the team in eighth place last year (Derby) was fifteen points off the autos, that is absolutely not acceptable for the amount of money we've spent.

I certainly don’t think we lacked fitness, given how we’ve looked better in the second half of both games. I think it’s pretty much a continuation of how we ended last season TBH. We were pretty poor for large parts of the playoff games, not to mention the league games against Ipswich and Bristol. Being without Charles and Jander is clearly an issue and Dobbin does seem like a bit of an odd signing. He can’t play the Larin role or the Azaz role, he just looks like another Archer. A decent striker in a two… which we don’t play.

Yet we always seem to concede goals with Wood in the team. One league clean sheet in 2026.

You play the team you think is most likely to win, which IMO does not feature Nathan Wood.

You don’t pick a team as a reward for the last game.

IMO it’s Azaz starting for Dobbin and Leo out on the left. Everything else the same, I don’t think there’re really too many options in CM other than putting Matsuki back there and playing Fellows right.

People have no problem with him leaving because of his contract situation, the need to sell to balance the books and the fact that we have three other decent midfielders in Downes, Jander and Bragg. FD and CB is clearly one of the weaker combinations and everone acknowledges the need to replace Charles with someone, so I don't know what you're complaining about. Today was about making do with who's fit, nobody was 'happy' about it. We tried Matsuki at Colchester to little effect, this was our only other option.

We had a 4-3 win their under Puel, within a couple of weeks of the Cup final IIRC, with Gabbiadini scoring twice. I'm pretty sure Lambert got a hattrick there too on the way up in 2012. I remember that NYD game (at SMS) being one of the most incompetent managerial displays I've ever seen. Vignal was a decent Championship LB, or failing that Skacel did a more than adequate job... nope; Jermaine Wright! Burley sat there like a clueless lemon, 3-0 for most of the second half, then sent on Adam Hammill in the 89th minute. That was the day he completely lost the fan base, he ended up in Scotland a few weeks after.

I'd wager that keeping three clean sheets in league games he started last season probably had something to do with it.