Andy

On the plus side, he's got better in the eyes of your average England fan with each passing minute, the whole of twitter was twerking for him the other day. If he'd featured in the shite performances so far he would have been an easy scapegoat so it's worked out alright for him in that sense. His time will come.

Agreed, although I can sort of see why people are interested from a footballing perspective, given the rumours of him leaving. Would potentially add fuel to that I think.

Like I said the other day, DCL wouldn't be the most inspiring signing, but the Wilson comparison is interesting. Wilson's premier league record prior to signing for us was relatively similar to DCL's (especially if you discount the latter's first season or two as a kid). He was hardly mega prolific either in a Bournemouth team that were more adventurous than Everton have been the last few seasons. Injury wise, DCL's have mainly been impact, whereas Wilson's issues are muscular and an almost dead-cert to reoccur. He doesn't suit our high intensity style too well, but we seemed to ditch that last season anyway, whether by choice or by requirement. I'm not fully sold but I'm also not entirely against signing him.

Interesting strategy of forming a defence made of players whose names are thinly veiled threats. Targett, Botman, Kilman, Burn. Intimidating.

He's got something, but when he has 3 goal contributions - all fairly routine assists to my memory - in approaching 50 PL appearances, there's an issue, especially since he plays quite high up. Always felt he doesn't have the knack for getting into dangerous positions and is too safe with his runs and passing.

Exactly. Nobody seems to be taking into account the fact that maybe the club just don't rate him as highly as the hype, or they don't think he would integrate into our team. I'm sure if we sell Minteh it won't be done without the club being confident it's the correct move.

Not a very inspiring target if true like, he's pretty much washed at this point and I don't think he suits our style either. Would rather take a punt on some random young foreigner that could go either way than DCL.

Carvajal defending better for Spain than he is for Italy so far

Decent result, already has a feeling of inevitability that we'll struggle against any team with a bit quality again though

Depending on how it's worded, ourselves and Man Utd could potentially activate before the end of June on the technicality that we were qualified for the champions league this season? The new season doesn't start until July.

Possibly an element of that, but De Jong has 178 goals in 306 Eredivisie games, and only 22 goals in 138 games in the three other domestic leagues he's played in. Bloke had one of the most tame shots I've ever seen when he was here and clearly wasn't cut out for the PL.

No problem with this move as long as the outlay doesn't prevent us strengthening in key areas.

In fairness we've struggled to shift the players in between for years, why would it be any different now?

It's more important than ever now to be a good selling club. If you want to compete in the current market, maximising value for your assets is the only way, and this is clearly part of the club's growth strategy which is why we've been snapping up young talents to begin with. At the end of the day, £40m for a kid who is unproven in a top league would be extremely difficult to reject. We signed Gordon for that price and he was a regular premier league starter, we paid less for Tino and Hall who had shown they could play at this level too. I'd like to see him get a chance here, but if daft money comes in, we will sell him.

I think the "success" looks decent on paper, but almost every time England have come up against good opposition we've fell short. The routes through the last two competitions were pretty kind and basically all games you'd expect to win (and comfortably in a lot of cases), but granted you can only beat what's in front of you. I think there's just a general disconnect that has built due to frustrations with the same players being selected over and over, annoying international breaks for friendlies interrupting the club season, a poor footballing style even with some good players at our disposal, and a manager who epitomises "boring" in almost every respect. Personally I'm mildly happy if England win but couldn't give a shite if we lose.

If it's a substantially better offer, it's hard to blame the lad like, especially since he gets to stay in London too. Easy to look at it as a fan and say "why would he go there to warm the bench", but he's a top level athlete, you don't get to that level without fancying your own ability.

Since Howe has been here, the only first team players we've signed from other clubs in this country, who remain at the club, are: Gordon Burn Barnes Pope Targett Livramento Hall You could argue one of those signings has been a failure - Targett.

City have been far from their best but Man Utd have been class tbf, text book example of how to counter this City team.

Well yeah, obviously, but we were probably at our level relative to the squad we had available.

Not sure what came of it, but didn't Joelinton go off injured in the Spurs game?

In that case, we shouldn't have been in a position where we needed this fixture to exist in order to fix FFP

Then my immediate thought is surely there's an easier way to materialise 3 million quid than travelling across the world, it's not exactly a huge amount of money in football. If the fixture was absolutely necessary, then at least play some fringe first teamers (Ritchie, Dummett, Krafth etc) so it isn't a PR embarrassment and a waste of money for fans who've forked up.

There's no benefit to it being arranged post season, is more my point. There's no reason these same games couldn't have been arranged for July, it's clear from the team Howe named that he had no appetite for this fixture existing either.

Hopefully the club have learned something from this and won't arrange another post season friendly like this in future, the spurs game I can sort of understand since it drew some neutral interest, even if the timing was still shite; this game was just a pointless exercise that has had absolutely no benefits whatsoever, in fact it can only really reflect badly on us.

They might "tell a story" but they aren't a good metric for evaluation of where a team should have finished, or whether a team should have won a game. In the case of Dyche's Burnley for example, they didn't "outperform their xGc", they performed at their expected level because they have a good keeper and restricted chances. These stats don't take into account individual ability of players at both ends of the pitch, which is the major flaw. A chance is only as good as the players involved.