Lighthouse

Does your keeper give you a biscuit every time you post about Romeu leaving?

TBH, as utterly bonkers as you have correctly identified this as being, I would actually like to see it. For no other reason than for people to see that Dyche has nothing to offer other than ugly football and won’t improve our results at all. Get Dyche in January, re-sign Romeu and maybe the penny will drop that neither of them is the answer.

Likewise. I thought it was an excellent window based on the assumption that he, Aribo and AMN we decent players and certainly an upgrade on Tella, McC and Diallo. Nope.

Thanks for another wonderfully constructed argument. The lure of parachute payments? They’re a safety net designed to stop clubs going out of business, after losing their share of $5.5bn, or whatever that TV deal was for international broadcasting rights.

He’s been consistently injured since he’s been there and that was his third goal in 2.5 years at Brighton. It’s easy to look good against our shower of sh*te.

You’re kidding right? Parachute payments are just there to try and mitigate the huge drop in revenue incurred from relegation and offset some of the disproportionately high wages. It’s not some bonus we get to cash in on, most of that will be gone on high earners we can’t offload. There is nothing financially good about going down and I can’t imagine it’s part of some long term strategy either. We were a point from safety when SR pulled the trigger, an absolutely bat sh*t time to throw in the towel and bring in a ‘long term prospect to hopefully get promoted’ manager.

Most of it has been spent staying in the Premier League. We do compete with those teams, we’ve been in around them for six years now. I don’t get your last question; literally ABK and Lavia six months ago. I don’t get all these, “what about Trossard/Brighton?” Posts. We’ve signed some perfectly decent players for the same price. What we can’t do is try and build a whole squad, cheaper than anyone else, year after year, and stay up.

Leicester, Villa and Fulham have all massively outspent us over the last few seasons. Brentford and Brighton are just the, “why can’t we be like them,” flavour of the month. Their best players will be poached and they will sink down again, same as everyone else. We had our four seasons in the sun, the only way to stay there consistently is to consistently spend big and we haven’t. Leicester did it for a while off the back of their league win, as soon as they stopped spending they dropped down.

Oh right, my apologies. How much did we spend?

He wasn’t done, he was a point off safety, with a reasonable GD, without anything resembling a competent goal scorer. Get one of those in and we’d have stayed up. Now though… we are hopeless, outclassed all over the park and will likely be spanked in most of our remaining games.

So we should always be like the two clubs who happen to be doing well right now on a relatively low budget, just because? That’s very much the anomaly, rather than the norm. We had our turn doing that between 2012 and 2016, it’s never sustainable long term. If I was a betting man I’d say both of those clubs will be fighting relegation in the next couple of seasons.

No, never at any point have I wanted either of those managers. Both will take us down, this argument is like saying, “this broken arm is terrible, I wish I had a broken leg FFS!”

Not arrogance but poverty. It’s almost amusing hearing people talk about the £70m we spent in summer as a huge investment. Our supposed big spending bonanza was basically 0.95 Nicolas Pepes.

That either of them would almost certainly take us down, so what’s the point in appointing a short term stop gap, with no real motivation to build a project?

He reminds me of an old Peter Sellers.

The man who got relegated with a much better team than this?

You say that like it’s a lot of money. £70m is bog standard for treading water, not soaring up the league. Generally speaking it is a marginally better squad, just hopeless in front of goal.

A third of the clubs in the football league are at moderate risk of relegation. Another third are chasing promotion, the league title or entry into Europe. Most of the fans of these clubs (some sixty-odd out of ninety two) will be demanding transfers in January to ensure they achieve their targets this season. Zero will be demanding their club sells decent players as soon as possible. Hardly any business will be done by anyone in the first week of the window and not much will be done at all. It’s January, it’s like this for everyone.

Coming up soon. Sadly Palace aren’t in it.

Hell, I’d have Steve De Ridder over Moi and Walcott. Whenever I look back on that season, it’s always weird seeing Lee Holmes on the team sheets. In my mind he was always just an injured, Poortvliet flop for us.

Fraser Forster diving down to stop a shot at... oh wait no, sorry I've got that joke wrong.

Plus he would actually have to sign a contract at a club he knows he wont be playing for, for no benefit to himself.

Without wanting to labour the point too much, I just don’t get it. I don’t get how any professional footballer, let alone a PL striker does all that wiggling to try and get around the keeper and when he does finally do it and gets into this position just stops and waits. It’s as if he wanted it to be saved, to save him the embarrassment of missing from a yard out again. There’s a lack of belief and then there’s this.

We almost never buy players from other PL teams anyway as they represent terrible value for money. Nobody is going to want to sell anyone half decent. We will sign the players we’ve always signed; youth, Championship and foreign ones.

I can’t imagine any reason why we’d be any different to any other set of fans, given our consistently poor results, overall, since 2016.