Lighthouse

Er… That would have been (I assume) Pele or Viafara, three years before Guly even signed for us.

Why does that responsibility fall on Baz and not Stephens or Bednarek, two experienced pros who actually play in said defence? I’d get it if misplaced back passes and bad coordination were putting us under pressure from needless free kicks and corners but blaming Baz for experienced CBs leaving strikers completely unmarked is one heck of a stretch. A decade ago the likes of Fonte, Lovren, Toby and Virgil were making Forster look top class when he quite obviously isn’t. Good defenders should be capable of organising themselves, with reference to the keeper, not being continually spoon fed the basics on who to mark.

I never said I wouldn't welcome the posibility of some competition, I'd be delighted to see McCarthy out the door and someone more competent brought in. There appears to be a semi-plausible chance of that happening, with the Everton and Palace rumours. I have genuinely no idea where you get this idea from that he gets a free pass. He lost his place to McCarthy for the final six games of last season and the latter promptly conceded 17 goals.

It’s so weird how the manager hasn’t come out in the press saying how sh*t he is, after being responsible for a total of zero goals so far this season.

Excellent bowling performance to defend that but it doesn’t cover up our batting deficiencies. The last two games we’ve been 153/1 and 130/0 and failed to reach 300 and 250 respectively. This squad is definitely a couple of batters light. Brown looking especially poor with 21 in his last 3 games.

There’s no way Chelsea would release a photo like that before he signed and TBH it’s pretty cheap and unprofessional for someone like Romano to use it in a tweet.

It can be a bit breezy from time to time in Riyadh, I imagine it would flutter a few steps away before he could stick his hoof on it. Why, if some sheikh wants to chuck his money at a footballer instead of another gold plated 20 bedroom palace, I don’t particularly see the problem. It’s not harming anyone.

If he dropped €10 on the street, it literally wouldn’t be worth his time picking it up. Insane.

Does this guy actually know stuff or is he just another random Twitter account people have decided must be gospel?

That team was three years in the making though, it wasn’t just thrown together in one summer. The best players - Lambert, Lallana, Fonte, Morgan, Hammond, Fraser, Butters, Kelvin - had all been there since the first L1 season and been promoted with the same manager and a winning mentality. Guly, Harding and Puncheon were all in and around the squad too. We literally took the best team in L1 and added Cork, Jos, Fox and De Ridder, with Lee and Sharp in January. This is entirely different kettle of fish, we have a massive squad of perennial losers, most of which we need to offload from the wage bill.

A bit different when you're one of the greatest players in the history of Italian football, have won everything domestically five times over, as well as the CL and WC. He was 32 then and had nothing else to prove.

With hindsight, that one particular game was memorable, the rest of that season was utterly sh*te though. I remember one particular home game, we lost 0-3 to Watford, I don’t think I’ve ever been so p*ssed off at a Saints game. Burley just didn’t have a clue as to even the positions his players were capable of playing and just sat there like a lemon until sending on Hammil in the 88th minute. Ultimately, winning is fun, losing is sh*t. The nuance being that winning against good teams is more memorable and losing against crap teams is more irritating. I’d rather get promoted and have more seasons like 2012-16, rather than spend years winning against Plymouth and Ipswich.

How in the hell is that not a penalty for Wolves?! How can a professional referee look at that 12 times and decide no pen.?

It doesn’t work like that though, does it. Obviously promotion is the aim but selling players for big fees isn’t what makes a team successful. Given the money spent last year and our drop in revenue, we can expect a modest outlay in some decent replacements but we clearly don’t have £150m to go chucking at a team of Galacticos in the next two weeks.

I wouldn’t say that as such. It depends how we play and if there’s steady progress as the season goes on. We all want to go straight back up but if we’re playing well and finish top 6, that’s not too bad, considering we’ve had to build a new squad with a new manager. This mess has been building steadily since summer 2016, not just under SR, they were just the ones holding the parcel when the music stopped. It won’t be sorted in one transfer window.

Unlikely Liverpool, I don’t think West Ham ever indicated they were prepared to pay more than the £32m we ended up with. On the face of it, that looks like we accepted a lower fee than we’d like in exchange for getting a disproportionate chunk of it up front.

Why? We know they’re willing to pay £60m, why would we now settle for less?

If you count AMN we've lost all four of our CMs from last season. Annoyingly our ability to replace them is being hampered by our 400 crap attacking players we're struggling to shift from the wage bill. I'd say we need two more on top of Charles and Smallbone, although one will likely be an emergency/utility/stop gap signing in much the same way as AMN.

Lavia chat moved to the Lavia thread, as it's a hot enough topic in itself.

If you'd told me in May that the best part of this transfer window would be selling our best player to Liverpool/Chelsea I'd have told you to p*ss off, but f*ck me this is funny.

Good luck to him, it was always massively unlikely he’d stay and a lower mid-table team like West Ham is probably a good level for him. I just hope Hammers fans don’t expect him to be anywhere near as good as Rice, because they’ll turn on him very quickly if they do.

The woman on a video call in the viagra advert, with her husband vacuuming. Don’t know why, she just annoys me.

I went along it was decent and a close contest, which came down to fine margins. Budinger and Ackermann were both dropped in the field, a pair of absolute howlers my gran could have caught too. The latter was on about 10 at the time and went on to make nearly a ton not out, which basically won them the game. It did look to be going to the wire with about 10 overs to go, then Currie got whacked for 20 off an over and that was basically it.

You’re all wasting your time engaging with this textbook, conspiracy theorist drivel. Imagine being so dense that you can’t understand how people can need to drive to work AND have concerns about the environment.

Because they may well be better than the players we already have. I'm not sure where you're getting the idea we have money to burn from, either.