80

He's been sick of the place for ages. Give it a few weeks

I don't quite agree with this point. The signs are we're moving towards a model where the head coach really is a coach. By rights then, a Sports Director should take on a lot of the mantle of a traditional manager in many significant areas. It's one of the things I don't like about the position in general as things stand today - it tends to attract people who want the power and wealth of managers while still skulking around and evading direct scrutiny, garotting other staff members to distract when the temperature gets too hot.

He knows all the words!

As I said the other day, Howe did his press conference and dipped his hand in the blood, which was a good thing. Mitchell hasn't, which is concerning.

I have similar experience and what you say makes total sense. Such people tend to succeed because others around them either can't or don't want to read them, though.

I'm sympathetic to a lot of what you're saying, but football does really need it's supporters. And generations are going to be locked out at this rate, with the average age of matchgoers being pensionable in the next decade or so. Massive growth is the best chance of enabling more people to support the club and keeping prices from skyrocketing even higher.

I think you can make the argument that 'hey, we would've grown their value even more if we'd paid £10m less for each of them!' but it does feel a bit like a successor grasping for self-justification, given the growth we have actually achieved. What's odd is we've done this 'Newcastle tax' chat before, and it was widely agreed in the industry that we'd successfully dampened that down. Splash the cash is an inaccurate characterisation. To give the claim its due, I think you can argue last summer was the window we appeared to let ourselves get edged up. I remember Livramento's fee seeming to crawl up from about £23m to £40m over a long period. Barnes too, as I recall. But is Mitchell in a position to know Everton would've sold Gordon for £30m?

I think we need to remember very clearly which side our bread is buttered. Especially when it comes to issues where we don't have cast iron evidence and are relying on trust.

Indeed, but maybe it suits others to have him portrayed that way... And Tonali, who he 'fell in love with'. And he's been sweet on a number of others who didn't come off, like Ekitike and Nmecha, off the top of my head. It's a false narrative.

Haven't read others' responses to this yet, but for me: I'm not minded to be generous in assessing what he says for a variety of reasons, so with that in mind, everything there comes across as a lot of hot air and politics. There's barely anything substantial to it that an outsider with passing knowledge couldn't say. The idea the Guehi saga has publicly drawn a line in the sand and shown our strength to other clubs is fanciful. Also his grammar is horrific - "Was, let’s say, the scouting network, the lengths and breadths of our process bigger and broader enough?" Happy to judge him on his future actions instead, but nothing here has impressed me.

They are! Just have to make hay while the sun shines. Listing just home or away skews the picture. It's pretty well balanced overall.

Sticking this in here for the more hardcore PSR people. Does anyone know for sure how fee amortisation works? I've heard a couple of assumptions, but nothing really concrete. What I'm asking is is it worked out on a daily basis, or some other way? In other words - a £50m fee amortised over 5 years, £10m p/a. Does that mean it counts as approx £27k for each day that passes from the moment of purchase? So if you buy that player 3 days before the June deadline, it goes down as approx £80k on that year's PSR? Was wondering just how advantageous having a little money to spend in June is. I've also heard suggestions you can move the weight of a deal around i.e. even though you bought with three days of the PSR window left, you can absorb a full year's worth of amortisation for that current year if you want to use up some slack you have. Is this true? Finally, another question on a similar note: if elements of a fee are conditional, how are the additional sums factored in once they're triggered? Going back to our £50m player, let's say an extra £10m is due if he wins the CL. It happens in year 2 of the 5 year contract, paid at the beginning of year 3. Would that sum amortise over the shortened tail of the contract? I.e. £10m p/a becomes £13.33m for the remaining 3 years of his contract? Or something else? No complaints if no one knows, by the way...

7 points from that lot last season. Would take that if offered it now, I think... Very happy with 8 or 9. For the full picture, away in the same period is: Wolves, Fulham, Everton, Chelsea, Forest, Palace. 7 points from 18 last season... Got to be bettering that. 11 points from 3 wins, 2 draws and a loss sounds like a nice enough run for me. I'd be disappointed with less than 9.

Nah.

Hopefully no ructions? You do great work so hope all's good.

I'm a big Krafth booster, but this isn't doing justice to Aaron Hughes, to be honest.

Ha, valid point. Howe will be going for it though, so it'll be him or Isak, I reckon...

The Sela Cup is a far cry from the Premier League though. I think the (small number of) games we've had so far have been too tight for Eddie to want to throw him on, and I don't blame him as things stand. Don't want to Tomasson him. Hopefully he'll get 45 minutes against Wimbledon. Can see that happening, with Wilson (also hopefully) starting the game.

Right, agreed, and Wolves away is exactly the kind of game we should be looking to improve upon. Despite all the talk on here about us away last season, most of our bad results were against teams you'd 'expect' us to struggle against - Man United, Chelsea, Brighton, Tottenham, in addition to the really big boys. The major disappointments were Bournemouth (+1 point already), Luton, Palace, Everton ('always tough at Goodison under the lights for us'). And Wolverhampton. 22/23's success was built on us running roughshod over the bottom half of the table, home and away.

These are the games we should be putting away, though. We can't assume we do the double over Villa again, beat Arsenal at home etc. 4 points is not devastating, but it is the same amount we got against these two teams last season where we didn't qualify for Europe. P.S. Tonali absolutely starts this one for me. Anything else is crazy talk.

Thought that was comfortably our best performance of the season. Which you can take as a comment on our earlier games, if you like. The players seemed really well drilled in the first half. I feel very out of step with a lot of the majority opinions on here. Obviously, very far from perfect, but I felt comfortable for about 75 minutes of the game. Most of their (half) chances came from deflections, and we had to score their goal for them. Their attacks were generally snuffed out by our interventions, rather than their players fluffing opportunities. And there were periods of nice fluidity in our offensive game that didn't involve us just throwing numbers forward. That said - and it's easier posting this knowing we won, given what I was saying about showing support the other day - I was pretty annoyed with Howe not making changes prior to them scoring. We were on the ropes, coated in yellow cards and I thought we needed fresh heads on urgently. What happened seemed inevitable, and we should have been less passive in countering it, by getting Tonali and others on prior to the pre-planned slot.

This place produced him

It was slick conditions for catching the ball at speed, I'm not holding him focusing on making sure the ball finished up outside danger areas against him.

But the best part is this one won't go into folklore as being a VAR fuck up because it was never highlighted as one by the TV. There's plenty that goes unnoticed with VAR in addition to all the horror shows we already know about.

Obviously we're aiming to change this, but right now we're the wrong team for him, really. In terms of showing him at his finest.