TRon

It's not that strange when you look at the players collective attributes.

His pace was scaring them bad.

Forest are taking a leaf out of Southampton's book and kicking us all over the park.

Spot on.

Willock looks ok thankfully.

Willock has been on fire so far tonight. Just our luck if he's crocked again.

He's playing through the centre for Forest, will be interesting to see how he does there.

Feels like we've got better footballers out there tonight, the balance looks decent. Think we'll play a lot more fluid today, hopefully we won't be gifting any goals, and we have every chance of winning this.

You're right in that they don't need to sell him, so obviously we are going to have to pay over the odds to make it happen.

So do I, and I would happily have sold him for half of the asking price.

I'm sure he'd consider leaving if the right club came in for him. Problem is there are very few clubs who will want to pay either his wages or the transfer fee we would need to make it worthwhile.

Then it looks a very good alternative deal to Guehi.

Can only imagine his wage demands must be pretty hefty as well, otherwise that price looks reasonable compared to where we are going with Guehi.

One of the reasons I said I would rather pay stupid money for Guehi than £45m for Joe Gomez. He'd be worthless by the time it came to shift him.

That will just give him more experience at his club while Liverpool keep top gun Allison happy at the same time. They win on all fronts.

Do you really think we are going to be knocking the price down the way negotiations have gone so far?

If they've bought in Chiesa and allegedly Mamardashvili then I'd say the gap is growing pretty conclusively.

I don't think many teams in the PL would be content with those as their CBs tbh, so I doubt Howe will be.

They'll still have them for this season, I'm not really looking beyond that.

I don't think we have the funds needed to outgun our rivals going forward anyway. We can just about put together a first 11 which can give the cartel clubs a good scrap, but once we get down to the subs it starts to go downhill quite fast.

Given how disjointed our football has looked since the halcyon days of CL qualification, I can understand the need to shore up the defence. We might be able to work out our problems getting the ball from back to front, but at least if we aren't conceding that still gives us a good shot of winning games despite not performing particularly well.

Their squad was miles ahead of ours last season, and the gap is only growing.

At this point any fee of more than £65m is going to feel like he's had his pants pulled down. Feels like we've put all our eggs in one basket and doesn't seem any other option but to bend down and lube up at this stage.

Well whatever the reasons, they do care about their image. The point being if they want a sports advert for their country, they'll want success on the pitch to achieve that.

I think they do care, but there's not a lot they can do about it since we will most likely get hammered if we invest more than allowed by PSR. Money isn't an object to them, why would they prefer to make small profits rather than huge ones by winning stuff via massive investment?