James

They let us have Hall

And Burnley

Our behaviour last August suggested that we had capacity for 1 signing - at the right price. we since sold Almiron and Kelly so might have a little more to stretch, but we will have a more flexible budget on 1st July. meanwhile Burnley have to sell this month. They will be holding out to sell someone else other than Trafford, or that someone else comes in to start a bidding war. the closer it gets to July the more likely they are going to have to drop their price for Trafford. We are potentially going to have a great deal here.

Here is one to fill the post-season void that I saw elsewhere. The challenge is to build the best quality NUFC squad using past and present players, allocated to squad numbers 1-25. Rules: - the players allocated to each squad number must have worn that squad number for NUFC - the players allocated is only as good as they were when they played with that squad number - you can leave one squad number blank to pick a wildcard squad number e.g 30 instead of 22. - you can also mark any player as U21 if they played for us aged 21 or younger, in return you get another wildcard 26+ number - an under 21 player must have had that number at that age and is graded accordingly at that age - you can have as many U21 wildcards as you want but be careful of being down scored for over saturation of the squad. - I will score you efforts and pick a winner. good luck!

It doesn’t fall off the books in a few weeks, but it falls off a year ahead of anyone signed after the deadline.

Palace away to start Boxing Day will be Burnley at home Final game will be Liverpool away

The trouble with player exchanges is that the player in question might not want to

Tuchel just told Talksport that he would have been preferred to Walker at RB - but they wanted him to have tournament experience with the U21s

since takeover the PL players generate the noise with the media, but Bruno, Isak, Tonali, Minteh were pretty much BOOM!

Tuchel turning out to be a bad fit. we should cut him loose and hire Ange

Probably cos Wilson signed the contract

Not a big fan of the decision to have this fixture. our Champions League results against the bigger clubs relies on a bit of underestimation followed by shock and awe. But if we draw Atletico they will have a bit of a clue about us

We have to sell our purples sometime, the key is to sell the right purple at the right time. id be happy to get a good price and sell him if it meant a significant growth in squad reinvestment. prefer to lose Gordon, but would rather keep Tonali, Bruno, Isak

Palace wanted Hall. Chelsea wanted Gordon but got caught out in terms of timing. We just moved first on Bruno and Isak.

Oliver Goodbrand en route for a medical - Hope

He’s about to get a life ban, his value is £0

I don’t think anyone disagrees that we can improve CB but there will be finite funds and a Schar injury is significantly less catastrophic than an Isak or Joelinton injury

Agree with most of the holes but Schar can be replaced by Botman/Burn and Lascelles and Krafth are not a huge dip either

Not at all stressed about our spending this month. it is impossible to know what we do or don’t have to spend from a FFP perspective and not spending this month may mean better options next month. will put faith in with the club on this one

I did consider and reconsider listing those last three but they were all developed to an extent that they are all millionaires which is still good even though they didn’t get right to the top.

We used to be one of the best scouters and developers of young goalkeepers in the country, just off the top of my head we have gotten and developed Given, Harper, Krul, Forster, Woodman, Alnwick, Gillespie - yes that is quite a range but demonstrates an output which is much superior than any other position we have developed players in. Now our youth keepers are so inferior we have to have players like Ruddy, The Greek, Gillespie instead of our youth keepers just to keep up the standards of outfield training. we have had to bring back one of our old GK coaches back on a part time basis to coach to goalkeeping coaches. basically Ashley gutted what was historically an excellent goalkeeping department. where am I going? Basically I am not convinced that we have yet to build up a good enough goalkeeper coaching department and I’m uncertain Trafford would reach his potential. Bad for him, bad for us. if much prefer us to be looking at 26-28 year old established goalkeepers.

Was thinking about Forster when the Krul links came in

There was an article about Matt Ritchie in the Athletic. He was commuting from Bournemouth to Newcastle via plane (obv not every day) and he made a passing remark about being able to talk to Tindall and Purches about coaching whilst they made similar journeys

I suppose have to remember that this is just a player’s preferred negotiation path but we saw what happened with Man Utd trying to haggle the installments of a release clause.

As per the Matt Ritchie Athletic article, Tindall and Purches both commute from Bournemouth and as those two are the main set pieces coaches it would be good to spread the workload a bit.