TRon

There's no way they turn that down. Looks like he'll be on his way.

There's nothing to suggest we are willing to pay that amount of money for him though. It's obviously just a stupid figure being thrown out there by Watford to counter our initial bid of £20m.

Plus they probably don't see them as a serious threat any more.

They are just getting desperate now. Marko Arnautovic, and now Chelsea's cast offs. They really are fucking hopeless.

The stats guy from the Toon Review channel (Alex) made a good point re Willock, he says he's still developing, we tend to forget we bought him as a 21 year old, and he's still learning to play a totally different way to what he was when he came here. He should be our back up from the bench rather than the main man as the AM, and that makes perfect sense. He could still develop into a really top class midfielder in the next couple of years, which I agree with.

So when you say fuck them, does that mean just fuck them as a regime, or that you will also stop supporting NUFC because they are now owners?

Honestly I think that is key for Howe. It's what I noticed in Ekiteke as well, other than his goals or pace, one thing which really stood out was he was happy to release the ball really early if he saw a team mate making a run.

That's my gut feeling tbh, said it earlier today.

seems like this will happen. Watford will be getting a good fee for someone who is still pretty raw, I think they will be happy enough if it gets to around £25m which is certainly more than anyone else will pay.

Yeah I would think we could do a couple of loan deals fairly easily. For example, even if we can't get Pulisic here, we could probably then get Hudson Odoi on loan. Not ideal maybe, but still a big upgrade on Almiron. If we spend any money on a permanent deal I would think it would be on a striker.

£20m for a totally unproven player is not really a shitehouse offer tbh. Has anyone else offered even close to that much? I get the feeling Watford will do a deal after a bit of haggling. He still looks very raw from what I've seen, similar to Bamba Dieng. It's all potential, but could just as easily turn out to be a kid who has some nice tricks but can't finish for shit.

Good. I'm hoping we see him more as a wide man rather than an out and out striker, because otherwise my guess is if he's seen as a striker that would mean we weren't confident of getting Ramos.

Yeah that's how I remember it. SBR had no doubts at all, he'd been following Bellamy for a long time and really wanted him for those qualities regardless of whether he had a bad season.

Same. We signed him after a poor season when Strachan played him out wide, but the season before he'd looked spectacular, although might have been in the championship. That's why people had doubts.

If he was shit I'm pretty sure they'd happily accept £20m. If we just step back a bit and read what people in the know are saying, then it seems he's highly rated. Forget our scouting team, Watford fans are saying he's good. We have a Brazilian poster who rates him very highly. Those alone are enough to tell me he must be a lot better than people are assuming.

Well, I am quite happy to see three clubs fighting it out for Maupay if I'm honest. I wish they could all sign him and hopefully that would be less competition for strikers we are trying to land.

Let's just get the lad signed first, we can worry about his future greatness/failure once he's on our books. At this point just about every forward we've been linked with seems to be blocked and deleted before the rumours even get lukewarm.

If he's going to Wolves over us, it's obviously because the manager is Portugese.

They'll be a stumbling block for most clubs though. There won't be many who will pay Chelsea wages, so either he stays there or some sort of deal is worked out where Chelsea pay some of them.

You may be right but we'll only really know that on deadline day. I don't think we've lost any players we really wanted due to haggling, if the Ramos stuff is correct, we are upping our bids to ward off interest from Everton and Wolves. Seems like those guys we really want, such as Botman, we will go above most other teams when push comes to shove.

Well it's always easier to buy a player the club wants to sell, even with a fairly straightforward proposition Man U seem to be dicking about with the Tielemans bid. It's obvious there is always some amount of horse trading going on with these transfers, it's not just us.

He's such a student of the game is wor Steve.

With the finish rate of our current ones, that's maybe not the worst plan.

He does show some lovely feet at times, but a lot of those moves seem to go nowhere. He's only 20 though, and he's a powerful looking lad. I am guessing our scouts and the Watford fans must have seen a lot more than we have, and they seem to rate him. Personally I'm getting Joelinton vibes after watching the video.

I watched a hghlights video of this lad, and tbh his final ball didn't look any better.