Rich

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y u using proxy den?

Think it expired at the end of July.

At LB he might. Aye, looks like being their first choice fullback to start the season. Bit of a negative choice that makes me 5-2-3 in reality, but he might be useful in terms of assists from there. For £5m it felt a no-brainer when compared to the other options at that price.

http://i.imgur.com/jJIOv4X.png Bit of a gamble with Lukaku like, but YOLO.

"The internet"

I've gone down my typically boring route and picked a squad from the top six. Plus Ben Arfa

Just watched Pardew's press conference and it reminded me that we basically have a fully fit squad. Now I'm excited again despite everything. Help me.

The most offensive thing remains the naming of the left siders first. What are we, Hebrew?

Sorry peeps, had a few problems with our Control Panel there. Haven't had a long one like that for a while!

Not the direct quote nah, lots of people talking about it but the original tweet. I did find out that Napoli are interested this evening though so that ends that You are not the sharpest mole in the burrow like.

Agree with this as well, it's a lazy sort of assumption like the "trousering" one was. The one positive so far has been the fact we've kept players since Carroll, which shows that they have begun to recognise a player's value is not just in what someone else will give you for them.

Think that's a fair assumption actually, although Cisse aside none of those deals have ever come off. I definitely think we're as tight as we can be on wages, agent fees, etc. and that we'll know pretty much exactly what we can afford to do window-on-window. However, as you say if something popped up to us that we could make work if it meant going outside of the pre-planned limit then they'd go to Ashley for the green light. January was that sort of thing, but was a bit of an anomaly due to our precarious position in the league.

This. Since Scanlon left it's been atrocious, but I have a feeling the lad left in charge has been hung out to dry a bit.

We have a really messed up policy tbh, we signed Cisse and moved a forward who was scoring goals for fun into a position where he was far less effective then in the summer we signed a player who the manager clearly isn't really sure how to use and a youngster. The Cisse signing really threw me and I am still not sure what Ashley wants. We would have been comfortably up without him and our history doesn't really shout proactive. Maybe there were strong talks of Ba leaving that January then for whatever reason it didn't happen so we signed a player we 'didn't need' which still seems far too sensible for us I think our policy revolves around a simple "value for money" premise, or at least it certainly did when Llambias was here. We've got a budget, we're going to do everything we can to perform to the best of our ability while stringently sticking to our financial limits. Get players for free and/or from France (where the wages are low and the tax is high), or take advantage of contract wrangles and release clauses. To be fair we've ended up with a surprisingly decent squad considering the circumstances we seem to move for players in, although I was hoping after some of the post-season talk in May/June about "lessons learned" that we'd be seeing a slight shift towards plugging the imbalances that have naturally arisen. Silly me.

Posted yesterday in the Transfer Rumours thread.

Michy Batshuayi, will be playing for Standard at Genk later on tonight.

I'm watching the Edinburgh derby. It's class.

Didn't he say it would be inexcusable not to get any signings in from a summer transfer window? No, just that he'd be checking with Joe for an update etc. Again. Why did he do the interview in a cupboard?

http://metrouk2.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/james-sanderson.jpg Click it.

Oh, and the one of the author: http://metrouk2.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/james-sanderson.jpg?w=300&h=300&crop=1 Looks a bright chap.