Shak

If Chelsea actually want him he'll be gone tbf.

Good bit cheaper to live here, I've found. Aye it does seem a very sad state of affairs alright Oldtype. Some friends of mine were at a Daejeon match recently, they were 2-0 up with ten minutes to go and lost 3-2, they said at the time the team completely just stopped playing at the end of the game. Player recently committed suicide (in Seoul, I think) as well I heard, hope it's nothing to do with the fixing scandal. Killing yourself over Korean league football would be as pointless a death as I could imagine, no Koreans I've talked to here give a shit about their own teams.

Read today that the minimum wage for player is about $11,000 per year. That's less than half of what I'm making working in Korea right now, what the fuck did they expect?

Fair enough about Cabaye, I didn't phrase that very well. Meant more so in terms of players who'll predominantly be operating in the final third. Marveaux is also a big question mark given the season he's coming off. Much will depend on what system Pardew intends to deploy, I suppose.

I don't mind signing those types of players if it means we're top 10 come end of the season. That would mean we're in a great position, my worry is that it will all backfire and we will have to panicbuy in January when we got all our signings along with HBA and Gosling injured for another 5 months. As it stands we're going to be relying almost entirely on Ben Arfa as our creative outlet next season. Given that he's coming back from a massive injury and was known as a very inconsistent performer even before that, it's not acceptable at all IMO.

Seems pretty likely we won't be spending any significant money, from the moment the Carroll deal was announced the club have been pounding home the point that the money will be reinvested in"the club" rather than in the team. My guess is we get someone like Steven Ireland (i.e a cheap reclamation project) and maybe a young striker for 5m or so. And the Carroll money of course will be spent on every single other thing the club does, as though we were never going to have to spend another penny again before we sold him.

Watch that whole match instead of watching stuff on youtube. You watch youtube you get Nacho Gonzalez you watch the whole thing you get me Rivaldo's dive against Turkey was one of the most pathetic, wimpiest things I've ever seen on a football pitch. There's absolutely no defending it, I don't care if the Turks were killing his family one by one in the stands. I'll leave it at that, you probably think thats more pathetic than Barton snapping at Gamst Pedersen or other players blatantly trying to injure players. I do, amazingly. Deliberately trying to injure someone is obviously a far more cuntish thing to do, but if you don't find a grown man writing around in agony pretending to be hurt to be absolutely embarrassing then there's something wrong with you tbh.

Watch that whole match instead of watching stuff on youtube. You watch youtube you get Nacho Gonzalez you watch the whole thing you get me Rivaldo's dive against Turkey was one of the most pathetic, wimpiest things I've ever seen on a football pitch. There's absolutely no defending it, I don't care if the Turks were killing his family one by one in the stands.

You really think Rivaldo was justified in doing what he did?

Hopefully he'll burn his bridges, the despicable tit of a man.

Aye cut the guy some slack Jon, you tit.

Random response from KD.

Think O'Shea will end up being one they regret. Man U squad players moving somewhere for first team football rarely ends well, he's not that good and will be exposed playing without a manager like Ferguson who is immense at making poor footballers look decent. Wickham and Larsson are both good signings IMO, and Gardner will be solid for them (they probably paid too much, but that happens when you have ambitious people in charge). If I were a Sunderland fan though I'd be disappointed with O'Shea and Brown, neither are very good and both are getting on a bit and will likely be on high wages and will expect to be automatic starters. Think the money would have been better spent on young talents who have room to develop.

Loved when he scored that stunner against Accrington, he looked absolutely devastated.

Long would be a very disappointing signing. We all saw first hand just how shite the standard in the Championship is last year, even Ranger managed a couple down there. And Long has only looked good there for one year there on top of that. Keep the money and put it towards getting N'Zogbia or another player who would really improve us would be my advice, add Long to our squad as it stands right now and he wouldn't even be in the starting 11 IMO.

O'Shea is nothing to get excited about like, textbook example of a very limited player who has been made to look decent by having Alex Ferguson as his boss for a long time. He'll not be a disaster or anything, but I do know if it was us signing him I'd be disappointed we weren't aiming a bit higher.

The two clubs you mentioned have both sold players to finance their transfer spending. True, but they've also shown a willingness to spend money. I'm far from an Ashley hater, I do like a lot of the things he's done since taking over. But I don't think he's got much ambition, and that limits what I think we can achieve. If we go out and show real ambition this summer and make a couple of big splashes in the transfer market then I'll happily change my tune, but I personally don't expect it to happen.

Spurs have managed it in recent times, and Arsenal have never been big spenders and are up there every year. The emergence of City and Chelsea has undoubtedly made things very difficult, but it's not completely impossible for teams to get up there.

How would we get back to being a CL team under a different owner? Find the best manager you can attract (rather than hire the most highly qualified of your mates) and actually back and empower him, for one thing. We'd probably need someone who was willing to speculate to accumulate too, given the state of the modern game.

Aye, we're in a better position but I do feel there's a much lower ceiling on what we can potentially achieve than there was under Shepherd. The only way we'll ever get back to being a CL team under Ashley is if we somehow unearth an absolute gem of a manager who can consistently develop young players into stars. And the odds of that don't seem all that good when you consider that Pardew got the job because he was friends with the people in charge.

"N'Zogbia was a player we were interested but you need to find value for money and we didn't feel he quite represented that. But we're more than happy with who we've brought in, I know Stephen had some problems with injuries last year but we feel he can really benefit from a fresh start and be a quality player for us."

Aye, sad to see.

Aye but he may as well be given how shit those options are.

All will be revealed by the end of the window. Signings like Marveaux and Ba will either be very shrewd squad additions or else they'll be indicative of a plan to build a team on the cheap. There's literally no excuse for us not to go out and add at least two really quality players after the deal we got for Carroll, I'm not expecting us to spend all of it but they need to spend a significant wedge.

Aye, and then ye sign Sanchez and tell Pedro to hit the showers. You lucky cunt.