Lighthouse

He looks like a Swedish, female biathlon skier.

Right now they deserve our support more than ever. It's tough enough being sent out against teams overwhelmingly better than you every week, without your own fans turning on you. It's the decision makers who left us rudderless in the summer transfer window who deserve our ire.

It's not pedantic it's a fundamental issue in this conflict. There is clearly a collective attitude among some that 'Israel' is just one entity but Palestinians can be absolved of any wrongdoing by refering to Hamas as a separate entity. If you walk around any UK city waving an Israeli flag, you wont get people telling you, "I understand your support for the Israeli people but not necessarily their military," you will get told, "you're scum, look at what Israel does to innocent Palestinians." There are clearly double standards in play here, which contribute to the subconscious animosity towards all Israelis.

You say that like it'll just happen, as if a player who looked poor against QPR at the bottom of the Championship will do anything at all against PL defences. Jamie White was a promising teenager, thrown into a Championship team, struggled and ended up playing for Totton.

I haven't got the faintest clue where you're getting that impression from, or how he ended up at Strasbourg when any other PL club could have picked him up for £10m, played him a bit and stuck a £100m price tag on him in summer.

It’s interesting how people who are so keen to point out the different between Hamas and Palestinians are quite happy to lump ‘Israel’ together under the moniker of ‘Israel’. Why not ‘Netanyahu/Israeli government’ or ‘the IDF’?

I had exactly the same thought about Nathaniel Clyne whilst watching the Palace game yesterday. Astonishingly, Phil Jones has also only just turned 33. I could have sworn he was about 22, playing for Blackburn about 18 years ago but apparently not. Still, at least Saints future is looking bright. It's only three years until we can sign all three of them and say they're great lads to have in the dressing room.

Imagine being in a relegation fight, then suddenly deciding you were 2004 Arsenal away from home.

Neither Martin, nor Juric, nor apparently Strasbourg's manager seems to have shown much interest in him and he looked a long way off being a decent Championship player last season. Will he be a decent player one day? Sure, maybe, who knows but there's no reason at all to think he'd have brought anything to our squad this season or that his value would have gone up just from keeping him around. If anything, with very little game time, he'd have probably left on a free when his contract expired. Rather like Tella, I've no idea why people get so upset about a player who did nothing here leaving for a decent fee.

We were very fortunate the SP game wasn’t about 5-1. I think they had something like 20 shots and 10 on target.

Let's get another one out of the way then.

Correct, he was not good enough for this season, probably wont be next season and wasn't worth keeping hold of. For the most part he has been an unused sub for Strasbourg, since we sold him.

Just thinking out loud, would it be better if all FA Cup matches from the QF onwards were played midweek? Would save rearranging a bunch of league games and having relegation/title battles where one team has played two or three games more than a rival.

Some things are more useful as a threat, should Russia try and escalate in some way. Basically Europe isn’t playing all of its cards straight away.

Leaking a massive price tag to journalists is a bog standard move for any player who has interest from other clubs. In reality we’ll get nowhere near £100m. We’ll also sell Ramsdale if we get offered anything north of £20m, partly for the fee and partly for the wages. There’ll be a need to balance the books and AR won’t want to hang around. Fernandes who knows, but I’d have thought we’d get £30-40m based on his age and ability.

Ings had some persistent serious injury and fitness related problems in the years leading up to us signing him. Why anyone would pretend not to understand that I can’t fathom.

He started 8 games in all comps for Liverpool across three seasons, only made 25 appearances in total and a lot of them were ten minute subs. There were serious doubts over his fitness, which he still struggled with in his first season with us.

With a player like that, I think we always knew it was high risk - high reward, this time it just didn’t pay off. We basically did the same thing with Danny Ings and that did pay dividends. Win some - lose some, I guess.

I’d say the only thing that is ‘quite fucking obvious’ is that Ross Stewart is not going to just write off the last year of his wages, or even a portion thereof, for no reason.

Christ, that was probably the first meme/internet celebrity I can remember, along with the Numa Numa guy. Those two have probably shacked up and got grandchildren by now.

We lost 5-0 at home to Brentford, then in our next league outing put in a much improved performance at OT. Even teams as appalling as we are have relatively good and bad performances. Fulham was obviously a better day than Spurs but with less favourable wind that game is another 2/3-0 defeat, on par with the rest of our season.

Why though, how does that benefit either party in any way? He’ll most likely see out the rest of his contract here trying to get fit again and retire at the end of next season when we release him.

I’d say that’s far more likely than the £100m some are talking about. It puts him right in Lavia and Livramento territory, similar players from when we last went down.

Probably money back, maybe up to £25m but I can’t see us getting much more. He’s a PL player but he’s hardly been astounding this season and I don’t think his standing will have gone up with other clubs since we bought him.