Lighthouse

Wood was poor last season too, I’d like to hope young Eddie Jack is being seen as a replacement in the not too distant future. Good to see Turner back in action, he bowled an absolute cracker to dismiss Roy. In other news, Orr has apparently broken his arm, so it would seem we’re going to need Gubbo for the rest of the Blast at least.

It takes a bit more than six goals from a striker to make me moist, personally. If Broja had done that on loan at Bournemouth or Everton, three years ago, I don’t think anyone would be particularly thrilled by this suggestion.

No they weren’t. There were a few questions over his attitude, after he fell out with Howe and refused to play for Bournemouth during Covid but he wasn’t written off. He was a proven PL quality player when his head was in the right place, so nobody was doubting he had the talent to tear the Championship apart. Broja is completely different. We’re now playing at the same level that he did very little at last season, I think most people would be right to be concerned as to how much he could deliver on the pitch. TBH this forum’s been a bit weird this last week. I was expecting people to be posting a bunch of YouTube videos of £20-30m players who are great on Football Manager. Instead there seems to be an overwhelming desire to set up some sort of charity home for all of our has been players from years gone by.

We aren’t going to get three players who can all play the deep lying role, who are all better than Charles. You’re talking about spending £60m on one position to do that and like I said, I don’t think Romeu is any better than Charles these days anyway.

Supposing we have the three that finished the season, Charles and a new bloke (in theory a replacement for Stu) I’d say that’s a reasonable number of midfield options, given how much investment is needed in areas like striker, full back and keeper. Romeu I’m not sure adds anything to that, Charles I’d wager is much more mobile these days if nothing else. If anything I’d hope for some versatile in the AMN mould, but obviously much, much better.

It's quite clearly a nonsense argument. 14 full games is completely different from adding up all of his appearances to make 14 games worth of time. Many of those appearances were sub appearances when he had a huge fitness advantage against the players he was up against. Then there's the fact that he's had two years of training in and around that '14 games' to try and improve his game play and he hasn't. 14 full games is quite a lot anyway. If a new signing did play every minute of the first three months of the season and contributed as little as Mara, yes I would want him dropped.

Teams like Saints and those two are only ever one bad transfer window or managerial appointment from a relegation fight. We went from sixth and three points of CL football to needing a win at Swansea to survive in two years.

Okey dokey.

He hasn’t had a ridiculously small amount of time, he’s had more than enough opportunities in both leagues and looked nowhere near being up to standard in either. The fact that he can’t get in the team, even with Stewart injured all season is his own fault. I can’t believe I’m reading a sentence like, "what benefit is £10m to us," either.

A lot of promising signs in that game but ultimately we lost it in the first five overs. You can’t chew up 1/4 of your deliveries and be 23/3.

Assuming that we do sign Downes and keep the same system in midfield next season, I still think we need to be bringing in another starter. An upgrade on either Aribo or Smallbone should be a priority, with one of them on the bench with Charles. I think a few people are underestimating the task we face this summer. The same team that only made the playoffs, plus the likes of Ings, Broja, Romeu and Lallana as some people are suggesting is going to get absolutely thumped in the PL. Last time we only just stayed up after bringing in J Rod, Davis, Clyne, Yoshida and Boruc to be first team starters. Half a dosen Mayukas and Gazzanigas and we'd have gone straight back down.

We don't need to bring in any back up. We need to bring in first team players who are better than the ones which only finished fourth in last years Championship.

Romeu is gone, and he looked just about spent in his last three months here anyway. That was two years ago and he’ll be 33 in September. We need to move on.

He’s shown no progress or sign of developing at all in the two years he’s been here. Worse than that he seemingly doesn’t even look interested half the time. I’ve no idea why you would want to keep him, aside from the fact that he’s 20, which every footballer in the world was at some point. We can’t just hang on to substandard players in the hope that maybe in five years they’ll be a reasonable Championship player, if we go down again.

I would hope we're aiming a lot higher than the bloke who just conceded the most goals in the Championship last season.

Our goal music is a song called Kernkraft 400 by Zombie Nation. The lyrics are - "oooooh oh oh oh ohhh ohh oh, oooh ohohoh oh oh oh oooohh" Hope this helps.

The 13 man squad for the first game of the blast has been released, I'm guessing Jack and Gubbo will be the two left out and we'll go something like: McD, Vince, Orr, Albert, Weatherley, Daws, Fuller, Howell, Neser, Turner, Wood.

I think it’s more impressive how we got 35,000 people to stand perfectly still for 14 seconds, so they didn’t come out blurry.

We need to be offloading players who aren’t good enough, not filling the squad out with them. Why so many people are keen to collect all the has beens from seasons gone by I can’t fathom. If Lallana, Ings and Broja had never played for us before and we signed the three of them, most people would be furious. Thankfully Lallana is the only one we may have to tolerate.

Does seem to be one heck of a coincidence that the coach we need to take us up a level just so happens to be a player looking to retire into a nice cosy coaching role, somewhere his family would be happy to settle down. As far as I’m concerned he can go off and prove what an excellent coach he is at Swindon or Pompey. We’re not a charity.

PL goals over the last 7 years: 0 2 0 1 1 0 0 I can barely contain my excitement.

It’s worth pointing out that being a good player doesn’t necessarily make you a good coach, as Rooney, Gerrard and Lampard have all recently proven. It doesn’t even mean you can coach your own attributes into other players. Che Adams isn’t a crap finisher because we never hired a top class, retired striker to teach him some secret technique, that’s just his own personal limitation. I could spend a month at football boot camp with Del Piero, Shevchenko and Van Nistelrooy, I still wouldn’t get into a half decent Sunday league team.

I keep reading stuff like this but I’ve no idea what it actually translates to in literal, real world terms. I can just picture Lallana turning up at Staplewood for the first day of preseason saying, “hey guys, I’m Adam. I came through the academy here 17 years ago!” Whilst everyone just stares blankly at him like, “oh right… yeah, cheers mate.” Literally every player came through an academy somewhere, at some point in their career. There’s nothing interesting, useful or special about Lallana or any of his lived experiences.

Ironically, I think the gay frogs thing was the conspiracy theory which actually had some truth to it. I forget the details now but it wasn’t entirely unfounded.

I’d like to hope we’re aiming a lot higher than some of the names being touted so far. Lallana, Ings, Romeu, Brooks, Antonio… that’s the makings of a mid-table championship team, with a large wage bill and an even larger injury list.