Lighthouse

Yes they did. SAA looked a long way off being ready, Dibling I didn’t see enough of but he had a few chances in the cups and the coaches clearly decided he (aged 17/18) isn’t ready for more yet. You have to be as good as Mudryk or Jackson to get a chance at Chelsea, you have to be as good as Sekou Mara to get a chance here.

You can’t really be saying that when you’re 16. They would have had plenty of opportunities at Saints if they’d stuck around and been good enough. I can’t imagine Will Smallbone playing 30 plus games at Chelsea.

We would indeed. However, the fact that he's already been here about seven years and we've had the pleasure of watching almost all of those 154 appearances leads me to believe that in reality Bednarek is a substandard PL player, whose many mistakes cost us a lot of goals at this level.

As much as I wanted Slovenia to pull it off, Portugal will probably make for some more entertaining games in the latter stages. I can't sit through many more of these cagey bore draws.

Let’s not write Wood off just because Swansea fans don’t rate him, after all Torino fans said Lyanco was crap and he….erm…. Yeah, sorry, as you were guys.

I'm not sure I'm buying that. If it was a charity or a mate starting up his own business then fair enough but we're talking about Puma and a PL football club. I'll pay what I think is a reasonable price for a T-shirt, same as a match ticket.

If anything I’d say our record of signing young players is better than that with experienced ones. In the last two years Manning, Onuachu, Orsic, AMN and Stewart have been something of a disaster.

He played 90% of the season and we got promoted. He was good enough, you’re going to have to let it go.

I don’t mind spending money but not £55 on a T-shirt which cost £1 to make.

Solid if unspectacular signing, fills the most glaring hole in our team and a definite improvement on Manning.

Never bought one for anything over £20 in the later season sales. Not bought a match shirt in the first half of a season for years either.

I think the strategy for this season looks pretty clear. Build a midtable Championship team, finish on 14 points and stay up because three other clubs get stuffed by FFP and finish on -6.

Looks like we got the fourth BP with about two overs to spare.

I think in todays market Delap is probably in the £15m Shea Charles ballpark and Chelsea wouldn’t turn down £25m for Broja, despite what their agent’s mum’s dog’s vet’s gynaecologist might have leaked to journalists on Twitter.

As much as people liked to moan, we were rarely this bad. Our possession football usually yielded an average of two goals and two points per game. England this tournament have been what we were in September. The difference is this squad wasn’t thrown together two months ago after all England’s best players signed for Tajikistan.

Good to see, after a wobbly start. Must be creeping towards a 200 partnership with Brown.

An actual Phillips screwdriver stuck into the turf…

Our problem is the man who picks up prostitutes playing GTA and drives them safely back to their home.

Szmodics seems like a plausible option for a club like ours. I haven’t seen enough of him to know if he can make the step up but he has at least beaten the level below us. I don’t know, I’m just some bloke on an internet forum. If the millions of pounds we spend on player research and recruitment, with an entire team of professional scouts, can’t find some better players than I can, sat watching YouTube with five cans of lager, then there’s no point in having them. What I don’t want are players proven to be nothing better than average in a much worse league.

The best players in the Championship and hopefully we’ve done our homework on some shrewd talent from overseas. Ings and Delap…. Jeez. 3 PL goals in 18 months and 8 goals in the Championship, I’m astonished at just how low some people’s expectations have fallen.

The Premier League is a huge step up. Even players who’ve hit 20 in the Championship like Earnshaw, Vydra, Rasiak and Armstrong have come up and struggled to get three goals. I don’t want young players with average Championship seasons, the minimum I’d be asking for is someone like Jay Rod, who scored in the twenties for Burnley and still only got about five goals in his first PL season. As of right now, Delap is a midtable, average Championship striker. If he has a decent season and proves himself too good for that league, then I’d start being interested.

What would be the point in that? All you’d be doing is replacing one player who’s not good enough with another. Adam Armstrong is consistently one of the Championship’s best forwards, he’ll probably struggle to get five goals next season. Liam Delap has 12 goals in two seasons at Championship level. He can have another season down there with someone else as far as I’m concerned.

You can’t just use that as an argument for any substandard player though. Liam Delap IS a bang average Championship player, nothing a complete stranger did 10-12 years ago has any bearing on that. I’m not normally a negative poster but Christ, if we did start this transfer window by signing Lallana, McCarthy and Delap, I’d be off to watch the women’s squash league instead.

So now the path ahead is clear. Kane will score a tap-in in an otherwise anonymous performance, to ‘silence the doubters’, as we scrape past Slovakia 1-0. Then we beat Switzerland on penalties after a turgid 0-0 and many people will proclaim it ridiculous that Southgate still gets criticised when he’s just delivered us his third semifinal at a major tournament.

Elyounoussi has had a similar-ish season in Denmark, so I’d still view this with some caution.