Lighthouse

Never saw Shearer play for Saints but that would have been my shout too. Unfortunately my cardiologist insists that I put Niemi in behind Virgil, after the last few seasons.

On a serious note, it does put a bit of perspective on Ings leaving because he wouldn’t sign a new contract here. If it can happen to Barcelona it can happen to anyone.

Messi is set to leave Barca. It'd be funny if this lead to City pulling the plug on Grealish, with Villa having already spent the money. Not plausible but funny.

Good luck next season. Unfortunately for you guys, signings like Ings just put you in 5th-11th territory with West Ham, Everton, Arsenal, Spurs, Leeds and Leicester. Admittedly above where we’re likely to be scrapping but I can’t see you taking it to the next level.

The idea of a football club signing a player from another football club and none of it having anything to do with Saints is just… oh I’m sorry I can hardly breathe.

So, who fancies a trip to er…. *checks list* ….. Latvia?

Apart from Virgil being a world record fee for a defender, Shaw being a world record fee for a teenager and everyone thinking Ings would probably go for about £20m with only a year left?

Complete conjecture.

I’ve seen some non-sequiturs on here over the years but this one’s definitely up there. Because Villa didn’t post a flurry of enthusiastic tweets, it’s likely that we were the ones trying to sell him? I’d say it’s an awful lot more likely, if we’re reading anything into Villa’s Twitter activity, that they know their star player is off imminently and having a massive fanfare over a signing like Ings probably won’t be too well received.

So you wish we’d received less money?

Just to put things into perspective, this is the entire team we’ve been paying to play for someone else over the last year or two. Forster may have to come off his line for a change but you get the point. Any club in the league is going to struggle paying for that on top of their actual match day squad. Gunn Valery - Hoedt - Forster - Vokins Clasie - Lemina Boufal - Elyounoussi Austin - Carrillo

Those 'best assets' are ones we didn't even have under Puel, so we must have done something right. As far as I can see we signed Ings, got some 40-odd goals out of him in three years, then sold him for a £5m profit. Seems like a well run business to me.

Because it amounts to the same thing. Gao doesn't give a flying f**k what the fans think, nor does Ashley. You can round up a mob of 10,000 and stand outside the Itchen screaming for him to be beheaded if you want, he'll just be sat in his apartment in Guangzhou or Shanghai not giving a sh*t.

I thought you didn't like taking the knee because it was just empty gesturing which achieves nothing?

Points over the last five years: 46 36 39 52 43

How's that going for them?

Yes, that is correct. Your point being?

Who said anything about rejoicing? We haven’t even signed his replacement yet. If Obafemi is part of the AA deal and we get rid of Long somehow, we may even get two more attackers in. The point is we appear, on the face of it, much stronger at FB already and other than Ings we’ve lost nobody of any importance.

You can’t be upset about the second half of last season AND be upset about selling some of the players who were responsible. Ings has 6 league goals since Christmas, that’s nothing incredible. Nobody is particularly confident but let’s at least see who we end up with before deciding we’re weaker. We’ve just signed Chelsea’s academy player of the year to replace Valery or Stephens covering at RB.

There’s a month to go in the transfer window. Should we not maybe, you know, see how that goes first?

I’m not sure what else anyone would expect. Gao isn’t putting money in, we can either be stingy and hope we invest better than three others or do a Pompey.

There is no ‘we’ in any of this, we’re no different to any other club. If someone offered Man City £1bn for De Bruyne and £1mpw in wages, he’d be gone. It’s happening with Kane and Grealish, it happened with Beckham and Ronaldo at Man Utd, Torres and Coutinho at Liverpool etc. etc.

We’ve sold a 29 year old, injury prone version of Beattie, with one year left on his contract, who didn’t want to be here for £30m. I’m actually mildly impressed, I was expecting it to be nearer £20m and to Spurs.

Well spank my arse and call me Geoffrey. I never saw that coming.

The only away game we won all season was in that shirt.