Wullie

Why should he be skinning anyone, that's not his game. I don't want to see them skinning players unless it's Ben Arfa, because that's the way he plays. The others should be going through them with passing and movement, which is coached.

He had them because he saw the importance of keeping a core to the squad over long periods of time, making it much easier to transition from squad to squad, hence the astonishing consistency he achieved. This is vastly easier to do with local and English players who are less likely to up sticks or have settling issues than foreign players. I can't believe I'm having to explain that tbh.

Anyone who thinks Ferguson had Cleverly, O'Shea, Fletcher, Brown, Phil Neville, Smith, Evans, Welbeck etc around his squad because they were the best he could get needs sectioning.

So Ian is your position that everyone else is the same as us? We'll put an all foreign XI many times this season. I'll be extremely surprised if anybody else does it once. If Swansea do it, I'll be fucking astonished.

Just bought an England international haven't they?

Swansea who've got loads of British players? Why do you keep bringing them up as evidence?

The Chelsea away game was played on the Saturday after Europe because of the carnival which Pardew said had cost us.

The only club you can think of in the Premier League with English players is Liverpool under Dalglish? Give me strength.

Re: British players being oh so expensive, I bet if you'd went to Swansea the summer before they got promoted, you could have got Williams, Taylor, Allen, Britton and Dyer for less than ten million all in. It's a mixture of sheer laziness and a horrible snobbery from the Premier League that lots of clubs don't shop below the top flight.

A core of players from the same country (and usually the same area) as the club is a prominent feature of nearly every successful side in European club football. But as usual, the European football geeks know better than the greatest managers of our time.

That'll have more English players featuring regularly next season then we do? All of them I suspect.

How do other clubs manage to have plenty of English players without spending these vast fortunes then? If you scout properly, there's loads of untapped potential in the lower league as evidenced by how well many players who've been promoted have done.

I'm on board with Disco's xenophobia.

As usual, everyone will rush to blame the Lyon chairman when the common denominator in all of these deals that go pear shaped is us acting the cunt in an attempt to shave a couple of percent off.

My favourite was when he said some of the players were tired because they had played on Thursday and some of them weren't sharp because they hadn't played on Thursday. This in the same interview.

Pretty sure it was not only run faster but also jump higher.

NUFC hate scummy money grabbing agents. So much so that they were willing to see their manager walk just so they could sign a player they didn't intend to use to keep an agent happy. "Agents! I knew it was them! Even when it was Ashley, I knew it was them!"

Kinnear's much of a muchness as a manager, they're both absolutely hopeless, I mean really rotten. Kinnear manages though, rather extraordinarily given the competition, to be an even bigger cunt. What keeps me going is that now that they're both working together, the odds have shortened on them both being caught in a wheat thresher or contracting bubonic plague.

Pre-season shouldn't just be about fitness, it should be trying to perfect the formation and playing style that we intend to use before the season starts. What is clear is that he's going to try and do exactly what he did last season. He's mentally subnormal.

Amazing how a couple of months can make you forget how much you'd like Alan Pardew to walk under a bus. Easily comes rushing back too.

Scottish Second Division... What's the verdict? Conference standard? Worse?

He did exactly the same last season. He treats the pre season as a run out time for the knackers whilst "protecting" the better players.

Breaking news: Adam Campbell's in Gusto on the Quayside.

Full strength obvs.

Give over man.