Lighthouse

That was implied by the number 91.

He has been massively flattered for years by having Pickford in goal and having some awful teams vying for relegation. Without JP, they’d have probably gone down level on points with us two years ago. Hopefully Everton get the appointment spectacularly wrong and manage to find their very own Nathan Jones.

It’s not so much the alcohol that’s the problem as the vast amounts of liquid being chucked into the air when 91 of the teams in the football league score a goal. It’s bad enough being sat next to a fat gobsh*te at the best of times, without him chucking Carling all over you when it’s -3 Celsius.

If you reach a critical mass of non-binary they/thems, they tend to combust.

I believe Cornet may have been as well. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to see the French horn him into their team.

I would think that is a decent keeper, average RB and three other substandard defenders, personally. Certainly not a defence I’d expect to produce much above relegation standard performances.

Idiots. Don’t they realise that could buy three mediocre championship players.

So what? If a statement can be equally applied to Cole Palmer and Angus Gunn, all that proves is that it’s basically meaningless, which is my point. Saying he came through Man City’s academy is a pointless statement, like saying Keith Harris and Eva Perón both like Jaffa Bars.

No but they are very, very, very obviously less match fit than they were the day Martin got sacked. They’re not fat but they haven’t trained properly for a solid month at least.

Good grief, this is just silly. If footballers get injured, they get fit again. If they are out of shape, they get in shape with strict adherence to a specifically tailored diet and fitness programme. It’s not rocket science, Jan Bednarek was out injured - couldn’t play or train properly at all - for a solid month after the autumn internationals and yet here he is, magically fit again without having to do another preseason. You can all sit here and pretend that Martin’s training sessions were worse than a month long injury if you like, I won’t be joining you. Paul Onuachu is unfit because Paul Onuachu is unfit. Same as Jordy Clasie and a few others always were.

Sure you can, why not? Send TP away to Dubai, Qatar or wherever with a fitness coach, get him doing whatever special fitness thing (I don’t actually know what it is, perhaps you can explain) he should have done in summer but is impossible to do mid-season.

You can’t think of a reason why I’m wrong, can you? Look, I get it, you’re upset because you’ve been beating the ‘Lego is the worst manager ever and it’s all his fault’ drum and now he’s gone everything is still sh*t. If preseasons are so important, why didn’t Juric put him on a special ‘preseason plan’, whatever that entails, when he was first appointed? He’d be fully fit by the time we play United.

That’s not being objective, that’s being deliberately vague to try and make him seem a superficially better player. None of that proves anything; He plays for NI, just like Corry Evans, and came through Man City’s academy, just like Angus Gunn. Would you want to sign either of those two, based on that criteria?

Pre-season is massive because generally speaking footballers go away in May and drink copious amounts of alcohol in Marbella, with Only Fans girls for a month. They come back at the start of July and have roughly five weeks to get match fit for the start of the season. If every other footballer in the country can go from zero to match fit in five weeks, then it’s clearly enough time for Onuachu to recover from whatever you think Martin has done to him. Players recover from injuries mid-season and get fit all the time. If TP can’t that’s on him.

Come the next league (Man Utd) game Martin will have been gone five weeks. You’re going to need to think of a new excuse for why he doesn’t look fit.

Looking at Charles objectively, he’s a mid table Championship player. If he wasn’t already on our books and we signed him now to help keep us up, people on here would rightly blow a fuse at how pathetically low our recruitment department was aiming.

He could be, quite easily, and there’s no reason to think he’d be any better.

It wouldn’t be the worst outcome in the world. I’ve seen quite a few comparisons to Tella, often described in a negative tone, but as far as I’m concerned we turned a tidy profit on a player who never did anything for us. If we do sell it’ll be for a fee which suits us.

He didn’t look ready for Championship football most of the time last season and appears to be just about finding his feet there now. I highly doubt he’d make any noticeable difference to this squad.

What are the rules for third parties owning players, I forget what it was West Ham got done for in that court case with Tevez? Could you set up a limited company that owns players like BBD, Fraser, Armstrong, Bednarek, etc. and just rent them out to whoever gets relegated from the PL for a certain fee, plus wages. There’s a growing niche that’s cropped up for players who are too good for the Championship but not good enough for the PL. I jest but that’s not a long way off their best practical use.

The teeth on packets of cling film.

I’m not under the illusion that Aribo is any good. He’s crap but at least he’s consistently crap, so you know what you’re getting. Les either looks promising or hopeless, it varies every five minutes.

I don’t think he linked to Rothwell that effectively last season but oh well.

That’s odd because other people have been insisting that he’s playing well, holds the ball up and brings others into play. Armstrong may well be too wide buts it’s not as if he’s never close enough to TP to play off him. Players like Dibling and Fernandes are always getting up the pitch around him, so he’s hardly isolated. Sorry, no amount of ‘yeah but you love Martin’ is going to deflect from the elephant in the room. Paul Onuachu is crap.

I’m not sure it’s even about the money, so much as it’s about the appalling lack of awareness surrounding our signings. I could have told you in June that Archer, BBD, Fraser, Wood, McCarthy and Edwards were Championship players and that Lallana’s legs were gone. Taylor and Cornet were just about credible as having done okay for Burnley in the past but clearly aren’t doing it here. That left us hoping that Les and Fernandes were going to provide the extra quality needed to keep the fourth best team in the Championship afloat.