TRon

Are you seriously comparing Murphy to those players? Point is we could sell all of them for big money if they were for sale, but they aren't. That's the only reason there's no tug of war for them.

That will be the big lad Paul and probably his mate with the yorkshire accent, Billy I think he's called. Both are neanderthals, I only watch that when they have the one called Statto on it, he's the only reason for watching/listening to it.

Pleasantly surprised to see him involved in pre-season tbh. For some reason I thought he was still about a month off being anywhere near playing.

Neither of them are back up though, at the moment they will be fighting it out to be first choice.

The real yardstick of this is which player other clubs are after. We had a three way tug of war over Minteh with one club apparently offering £40m. There's probably a reason why that's never been the case for Murphy, and it's not all down to age.

We have to pay him £3m to leave it seems.

Move this one to the realistic transfers thread!

Well that all sounds very worthy, but I'd still rather see him fail. Would make me feel a lot better about trousering the £30m.

We do have probably the creme de la creme of world football forum know-alls tbf.

I hope you're right and he turns out to be a flop. Personally I'd have preferred him being brought into the squad and challenging for that RW slot which is a big weak point for us IMO as I like the look of him a lot.

It was slightly tongue in cheek tbh, should probably have put a daft smilie in there somewhere. That said it was also maybe 17% serious, you have to admit Eddie likes to play mind games (allegedly).

That's like saying as long as Wilson goes through the season injury free we are qualifying for the CL.

We need that RW in before the season starts. If we end up starting Miggy against Brighton with Minteh lining up opposite there could be repercussions that reverberate through the ages.

He's applying pressure to Mitchell to get the deal done. There's a bit of "Ok then hotshot, let's see you do better than we managed for the last couple of years".

He's not been brought in for just one window like.

I think we'll get a CB one way or the other with Botman and Lascelles being out until the winter. RW I'm less confident. I could see us thinking, well at least we've got Miggy and Murphy if we can't get the player we want at the right price.

He could still run his contract down, at this point I'd say it's more likely than not. So that will be a double fuck you to the club as we'll have sold Minteh anyway because he thought he'd have less obstacles to the first team there than at Newcastle.

I think the professional thing to do would be to have told Miggy in January that his future was limited at Newcastle and a move would be in his best interests. If he wants to stay then there's not much we can do about it, but it does mean he must have no ambition (assuming he was told that). Either way, the upshot of players like this staying is we have sold Minteh. I think that was a bad outcome personally, but I guess we'll see for sure next season.

If he wouldn't have been in our squad then you can understand why he was ready to move to a club where he feels he would have a better opportunity. I've read that Howe was unhappy that we were forced to sell Anderson, personally I'd be a lot more pissed that we were forced to sell Minteh specifically because he plays in the position that we are probably going to have to spend at least that much to bring someone else in. Maybe he'll be much better, I guess we won't really know until we see how this season pans out and if Minteh gets much game time at Brighton.

I'm just putting it out there that this was said by an Italian journo. I said in the transfer thread yesterday that Thiaw is only 22 years old so we might believe a) he's going to get a lot better b) in our formation we might have one of the CBs sitting deeper anyway to cover the counters.

I doubt it's going to be that much. The Italian journalist who was on the Loaded podcast yesterday was saying he would be happy to take £15-20m based on his recovery pace not being great when Milan pressed high.

Will be interesting to see who we can bring in that is totally proven for £30m then. I would imagine it could only be someone in their late 20's who is already at their ceiling.

Those are all players who were already at the club. If you look at the transfer dealings so far this window, we've actually got worse as we've lost Minteh and Anderson. I'm sure we'll see incomings, but as of now that is where we are at.

I'd assume even if we push forward we'd have one defender sitting deeper anyway to cover for any breaks by the opposition, as you say we seem to have managed with Schar and Botman pretty well when they played together. Plus this Alessandro guy seems to think Thiaw reads the game pretty well and that is also similar to Schar.

The Milan guy is emphasising he's only 22 so lots of room for improvement, but would be a bit of a comedown from signing Tosin on a free then spending big money on Thiaw who has potential flaws in his game. Guess we just have to go with our scouts who must have watched him pretty extensively.