Lighthouse

Easy, just find an even catchier, more annoying song

A few things wrong with that: Firing rockets into civilian areas is not fighting back, it’s attempting to murder civilians. It’s not Israel’s mission to do exactly that. If they just wanted to kill civilians they could have killed hundreds of thousands. No amount of whataboutery means ‘you can’t complain’ when you’re an innocent civilian and people are trying to murder you.

Yes. Yes you can. That’s a deliberate attempt to fire munitions into populated civilian areas and kill as many people as possible, as they have been doing for many years. If I were an Israeli I’d probably be complaining about people trying to murder me.

I’d say not wanting them back IS getting over it, TBH.

In which case a loan would make sense for them.

But signing Lallana is basically the opposite of pragmatic, it’s driven purely by wistful fantasy and nostalgia of games he played for us 15 years ago. Injuries have prevented him from being anything like that player for many years now, to the point where he doesn’t appear to have a future at the club who just finished eleventh. Steven Davis for £800k was a pragmatic signing. So were Hammond, Butterfield and Harding in the lower leagues. We'll need a couple more of them but Lallana isn’t one of them.

It’s a very important role, we need to be errr… putting…. more black people in hospital, have I got that right?

I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone would want Lallana, just because he’s been here before. Two years ago people were saying that anyone who didn’t want Bale back was an idiot. After six months of 20 minute MLS jogging sessions, in between rounds of golf, he went to the WC, was the worst player in it and promptly retired. If you’re recruiting players based purely on attributes and fitness, Lallana isn’t even on the radar.

Jack and Jan are a decent level of third and fourth choice CBs for a club like ours, hoping to be stable in the PL. Would I want either starting in August, assuming everyone is fit? No. I’d like to hope we can get ABK fit and in the right mindset, then we just need to keep KWP, find a LB with a double barrelled surname and our defence might look alright.

The Beeb are reporting Chelsea are after Maresca, which I think will be a hilarious disaster all round of it does happen.

Why wouldn't we be? If we're letting McC go, we're clearly looking to get someone in and they're going to have to be good enough to start the lions share of games next year. At the risk of repeating myself, it'll likely be a new first choice, Lis and Lumley until Baz is fit. Better keepers are NOT going to come here and be third choice.

I think you greatly overestimate the standard of footballer willing to be third choice goalkeeper at Saints AND within our budget. He's obviously not going to be starting PL games, unless we have a serious injury crisis. I would hope we're looking at a new first choice, with a view to competing with Baz long term, with Lis and Lumley as cover until the latter recovers from his injury.

We don’t need two new keepers, if we let Lumley go we’d only end up replacing him with another player of similar calibre. We’ve a big enough recruitment task as it is this summer, without wasting time on a like for like swap for a third choice keeper. We will almost certainly be looking for a new first choice, Lis will most likely be on the bench until Baz is fit, Lumley is third choice. I’m not sure what else you’re realistically expecting.

Lumley is a reasonable enough, low budget, third choice keeper and no worse than Cropper or Forecast have been in that role in the past. He’ll probably only play a handful of cup games against lower league sides next season and even that’s only because Baz will be injured. McC’s wages are too high for that role and judging by this season it’s been a bit too costly to even have him in the squad at all.

Him and Rudi Skacel are going to interchange on the left, putting crosses in to Onuachu to nod down for Kevin Phillips.

I’m not sure that logic follows. It’s a bit like saying, “short term the house is on fire, so covering the furniture in petrol is fine.” We will need better players than those mentioned to be starting for us next season.

He’s not a ‘sit back and spray it around’ type of midfielder but if we’re looking for an upgrade on Smallbone (which we will need) with a good engine, I think he’d be a good candidate.

They’re taking it very hard.

I hope he gave Sunak a piece of his mind when it started raining.

So if the targets he was set at Swansea and MK we’re solid mid table finishes, then he would have achieved something.

My defence is nothing but a factual representation of what we’ve done with him in the team. Baz played every minute of the longest unbeaten run we’ve been on since Vicky was on the throne, we were in the hunt for automatic promotion and we did get those results against West Brom and Leeds. You don’t do all of that with some hopeless liability in goal. Even if he is a hopeless liability, clearly his magical, super lucky leprechaun powers have brought us good results and it’s better to be lucky than good. P.S. The thread title wasn’t changed as such, I just merged this with the existing McC topic.

You could have said the same about Hooiveld, Kelvin, Fox, Sharp, Hammond, Puncheon, Butterfield, Chaplow, Richardson and a few others last time we came up. We’ve taken zero points of Leicester and Ipswich this year, in three months time they’ll be the four ‘easy’ games.

Promotion is certainly going to throw some pigeons at a cat, as Paul Merson would say. After the euphoria of yesterday, we’re going to have to start facing up to the fact that the majority of the players who got us promoted aren’t really good enough to stay up. Even some of our best players from this season, like Bednarek and AA, are only ever going to be relegation battle standard in the PL.

If we finish 8th in the PL next season, would you consider that ‘not achieving anything’?