Ashley17

Leicester have spent a fucking fortune to be honest. In the last two seasons: Maguire £17m Iborra £15m Adrien Silva £22m Iheanacho £25m Ndidi £17m Slimani £28m Musa £16m Mendy £13m Obviously they've sold their title winning central midfielders to finance some of that but most of those deals piss all over our record fee and some have already been moved on. One of them has even been loaned to us ffs. Puel can't really be held responsible for many of those deals but they just seem to be struggling to score at home, he had similar problems at Southampton. He's still taken them from 16th to 8th since he's been in charge so you'd think that would be worth some credit.

It's a comparison to their actual position.

I just don’t get why you would call up two debutant centre halves and then pick a back three like that. I know Gomez is primarily a centre half who captains the under 21s in that position but Walker...ffs

Will they all be added to the same gameweek? And you should have 11 good players already, the free hit only gets rid of transfer costs, doesn't allow to spend more than your budget. They should mostly end up in the same week, the exception being Spurs because Sky have put them on a Friday night against Brighton which means they won't be able to play the Wednesday. Obviously you can only improve within the budget but depending on the fixtures players playing twice in a gameweek you would hope would outscore players playing once. If you look at who isn't playing today: Chelsea, Man Utd and Man City are all probably going to play twice in the same game week, plus possibly Tottenham. Arsenal too but they've basically sacked off the league, you get the idea anyway. It's all a guessing game anyway, there's no right way to play the game, this is just my logic behind having 5 players today.

Decided to save my free hit for the double game week when the 6 postponed matches are tagged on. Would rather have 11 good players playing twice than a selection of dross playing once

Can't see him getting in the England squad. Smalling was left out of the last squad for not being good enough with the ball and I don't think Lascelles is any better, even if he has improved. The England squad seems like a bit of a closed shop, whereby they've decided on a pool of players at the various levels and if you're not in them, you never will be. The exception to that, oddly, is Jack Cork, but I think that says more about our midfield options than anything. He certainly deserves a cap though as I think he's really under appreciated outside of the region - how many English captains are there in the Premier League? How many captains are there under the age of 25? England could do a lot worse (and probably will) but we'll take someone like Joe Gomez because he's in the Under 21 squad. It's ludicrous.

Considering we have 3 weeks between games I think it's a good idea

I watched quite a bit of the 97/98 season the other night as my Grandad would record just about everything we were on. The absolute pinnacle is the Champions League qualifier in Zagreb, which was live on Channel 5 with Jonathan Pearce. Steve Howey is a pleasant chap: But also, how ridiculous is this goal from John Barnes?

They have two on tomorrow

I think Yedlin actually got the touch on it that sent it round the keeper so Sanchez wasn't in his stride like he would have been had he taken it round the keeper himself. Couldn't believe that didn't end up in a goal!

Caption said WBA, so no

Fenton does an interview in Touching Distance and it mentions he had followed Newcastle since he was a boy

Could you Twitter gents do me a favour and give this a share please? http://www.planetfootball.com/nostalgia/michael-owen-beacon-hope-newcastle-not-seen-since/ Here’s the tweet if you don’t mind just hitting RT please. Would be much appreciated!

It’s the best we can hope for. A proven PL striker who is miles better than what we have. Obviously there are fitness question marks but beggars can’t be choosers

Iheanacho is not coming here in a million years

If that was us, you'd be moaning about buying one of our relegation rivals' second, third or fourth choice striker. Fair comment tbh. We already did that with Joselu

Few random observations from today's game: There isn't an ounce of leadership in the team if you take Lascelles out. Clark is probably the closest we have to a leader from the remainder as shown by him bollocking half the team for not getting back quick enough after we nearly gave Luton a goal on the counter. Perez had a pretty poor game but scored two tap-ins. Mind you, I wish Gayle would score some tap-ins because he doesn't look like scoring at all at the minute. How they got away with only one booking I have no idea. There were 3 or 4 cynical fouls where an advantage was played and their player should have been booked in the aftermath. Oh and the one where their striker gave Manqullio a shove into the hoardings. Ritchie was pretty anonymous until the final 20 where Luton started to commit more men forward. He's quickly becoming our least effective winger, as Murphy has come on leaps and bounds now he gets regular minutes. For all Woodman got caught with a couple of slow clearances, some of the passes he pinged 30 or 40 yards to spread the ball out to the wing were light years ahead of anything Elliot or Darlow can do. Not the finished article but he looks every bit your "modern" goalkeeper and made a couple of decent saves too. Second half was a struggle, not sure if it was complacency or whether Luton getting the early goal put the shits up us but I wouldn't be in a rush to see Hayden at centre half again any time soon. Has he ever played a game without getting booked? It was a much stronger team than expected, which is welcomed, I wonder how much of it is down to the supposed "huge bonus" Ashley put up? If it is even real. If there's big bucks up for grabs I don't imagine the senior players would be too delighted if it went up in smoke by playing a weakened team. Anyway, none of that matters. We're in round 4, relatively easily, let's just see where it goes. We have about 18 average players and 1 or 2 worth protecting so I'd expect us to be able to field fairly strong sides in future rounds without really damaging our survival hopes. The likes of Swansea and Bournemouth have replays to contend with, so not a bad weekend all in all.

How the fuck did they get a 0-0 draw at Wolves?

Saivet better than Shelvey Get Ronny Deila in as gaffer. Assisted by Bob Bradley naturally

It’s Wullie’s list plus Beardsley and Albert

Plays lots of positions, presumably very cheap for a 6 month loan, can be done quickly - already looking forward to his man of the match display vs Luton tbh

I know Murphy is only young but bloody hell, his decision making is awful. At least he’s shown some talent on the ball so far though I guess.

Has Pulis taken over? Allll the defensive midfielders

Atsu hasn't gone away with Ghana though has he?

I think they try and do that with boxing day where possible, but of course any derby requires extra policing. It's why we're usually in the North West somewhere on Boxing Day