TRon

Murphy's got poor ball control under pressure which makes possession an issue. He doesn't carry the ball particularly well either, I would argue Livramento is better in that regard. I don't think it's right at all to call Elanga a younger Murphy. That's not me having a go at Murphy either, he's got strengths which counterbalance his weaknesses, but for us to improve against the low block we need players who can help with ball retention.

Even that's hard to do without pace, would take a pretty special player who can do it, and would cost quite a lot I imagine.

That provides a bit more of a risky policy where you are going for unproven players. No other top club bought him either remember. I think we may end up having to go this route anyway as there is no way we can get 4 players with our budget if we are going to be quoted £60-70m for every PL based player. How that will work with Mitchell gone is going to be interesting though.

Fucking hell. I only just tuned in to a podcast which mentioned him as someone we might have looked at as a signing this summer. What a tragedy for him and his family.

We might just have bought him because he was free and we knew we could make a profit when we sold him as a result of that.

That would be pretty negligent tbh, but there's no way of knowing if it's true. I would imagine we should have a pretty good idea of whether players are coming or not, we defnitely should have had an idea with Delap and Pedro, in which case we should not be allowing secondary targets to go elsewhere. But we have no idea if that's happened or if it's just paranoid nonsense.

I think we probably have missed out on our top targets but how realistic they were is the question. If the biggest clubs in the world/cartel clubs are after the same players then we aren't necessarily going to be favourites for the signatures.

That's what I thought.

There's a DOF vacancy at Newcastle, you need to elbow your way to the front of the queue and get in Yasir's face to tell him what's what.

Are we a bigger draw than Juventus? Genuine query, I know the Italian league has less money, but they are still a massive club.

This is where I am at as well. I think it's fine to express views let's be clear. But at the end of the day mine is that PIF due to their nature are going to be ambitious and want the best. Even if they put national interests first, our success is still pivotal to them while the PL is the worldwide draw it is. I think they will appoint experts to make the big decisions, and trust they will know a lot better than we do how to execute accordingly.

I expect us to do this later in the window tbh. I'm sure Eddie would prefer to sign the likes of Mbuemo and Pedro, but once those possibilities have gone, then we can start bolstering the squad with the best of the rest.

It's a fair aim. PIF might not have executed it perfectly, but the way I see it, there's no better alternative out there, so I just hope they have our best interests at heart. As much as any modern day ownership can anyway.

It's going to be frustrating but I think we might end up making a raft of late signings. Just looking at the rumours on players we are after, like Elanga, Pedro, Mbuemo, Madueke, Kudus and so on, just about every cartel club has also been linked with them. It actually makes sense not to make any moves until those clubs have come out of the woodwork and made their bids. If we are successful in competing for players, great. If not, those clubs will be out of our way by the end of the window and we can go after emerging players who won't be attracted to sitting on the bench at cartel clubs.

He'll be identifying the players he wants. He won't be negotiating prices or contracts.

This is what I mean by a disconnect between Howe and the recruitment team. There might not be one, but you can easily imagine there might be.

Even if we were, we can't match Chelsea for wages. Even given we could match the wages, we have been told the player wanted to go to Chelsea. This is what is being reported, not that we couldn't afford the £55m+5m.

Depends if there's a disconnect between Howe and whoever is doing the transfer deals. We lost out on Pedro but that's as much because he wanted to go to Chelsea than any other reason. I'm not sure we can do much about situations like that if we are competing with the biggest spenders in the PL. If we start getting a bit more creative in the transfer market and look further afield we could probably get 3-4 decent signings but they might not be PL hardened. Is everyone on the same page with that though?

I think we want Elanga, but like with other PL based players we'll have to pay through the nose to get him. I'm hoping we've got some good alternatives lined up abroad who we can at least use alongside Murphy and who will have a higher ceiling.

He'll probably turn them down hoping Chelsea or Spurs swoop in.

On to the next one.

He's two footed as well. Seems a bit of a disservice to label him as just fast.

Just reading today that Spurs are in the market for a RW, and are interested in Semenyo and Kudus before anyone gets too excited at the prospect of us getting a free run. Oh and Chelsea are looking at Kudus too.

If Liverpool rated him that much I think the asking price would be a lot higher than £40m. From what I read Slot doesn't think he's got the physicality required for his football philosophy, and I think Howe won't want him for the same reasons.

Agree. He gets Newcastle, but as an outsider who has come from a smaller club, he will totally understand that the established big clubs have a bigger pull than the likes of us or Villa. We saw this early on with Ekitike, it's not something new.