Andy

I'd imagine both were fitness related.

Thought he did everything well. Stellar debut.

Bruno's sprint is like that jog that people do when you let them over a zebra crossing

As clear a foul as you'll ever see

Not quite that far for me, but it certainly emphasised what the club is currently lacking a bit in terms of connection between the ownership and the fans. Amazes me that some people still hold a grudge against her for the Anderson and Minteh thing, and that some people wouldn't have her back. She literally pulled our club out of the darkness.

This season already feels like a rerun of two years ago. Difficult opening fixtures and CL draw, new signings unavailable to us, players dropping like flies before the fixture list has even got congested. Frustrating as fuck.

It was both. He played for a lot of either shite or pragmatic managers, and he also had his own mentality issues. His best football was at Nice where he was allowed to play in a way that really suited him, he was basically unstoppable that season, and moving to PSG after it was a huge blunder.

To be fair, it's much more difficult to give his performances the benefit of the doubt when he's later proven that he's very happy to down tools and strike. If he hadn't shown himself to be rancidly unprofessional, I'd assume he was too professional to deliberately down tools.

Sabotage is a strong word, and as you say, would normally sound a bit Tin Foil Hat, but it's definitely clear at this stage that his loss of form/lack of impact on games wasn't a coincidence. I don't necessarily buy into him deliberately missing chances, but I do think he was deliberately half arsing it, likely to keep himself fresh and injury-free ahead of a potential move.

Probably quite hard to demonstrate that you've been wrongfully defamed by a journalist who is accusing you of sabotage at the end of last season, when you've literally just went on strike and very publicly sabotaged the start of this season.

I have no issue with the Instagram posts in general, but it's hard not to read the chemistry thing as: "me and Alex link up well btw, Liverpool!'.

We got to the bottom of why Rich was so outraged when he made this post yet?

I do find it funny when people say "he's just turned 29!!" as if we should be rolling him out in a wheelchair. He's still in his prime man Aye he'll be coming to the end of his career when his contract is up, but there's nothing wrong with that. Not every signing needs to have resale value.

Anyone feel like Isak has become vastly more highly rated as a player in the eyes of the media since all this has happened? Last season pundits frequently referred to him as "one of the best strikers in the league", now he's instantly "the best striker in the world" according to a lot of them. The latter may or may not be true, but I just find it funny that there was a reluctance to go to that extreme when he played for us.

I wasn't sure if he liked us but he wrote that with real passion, I'll be proud to see him line up for Liverpool now

we were absolute shite until December literally just last year, people have short memories.

If that was the case, we wouldn't have been bidding on strikers left right and centre, while also putting out the message that two signings would allow the Isak deal to proceed - which ultimately proved to be true. In my opinion, reading between the lines, the club were up for selling him the moment he went on strike and that first bid came in. At that point it was about replacing him and getting what they considered to be a fair price.

Correct. It is exactly the same as that. Footballers are still humans, Isak will have friends in the camp, Sven is obviously one of them. People make the mistake of holding footballers to ridiculous social standards. They're young lads who in a lot of cases just see it as a job, they're not going to burn long term friendships over someone changing employment. In the grand scheme of things, him liking Isak's post on Instagram is about as insignificant a thing as I could imagine anyone possibly getting worked up over.

Just because it's not the same to you, doesn't mean it isn't the same to them. They don't see football as fans see it.

If someone in your workplace leaves, you'd likely wish them well if you got on with them previously, I've done it many times even if them leaving created additional workload or stress for me in the short term. Football is a profession to these lads, they don't have the same partisan mindset that fans do.

Been saying this all summer. I'm not sure he deliberately missed chances, but he absolutely downed tools and went through the motions on the pitch, and that sentiment is shared by at least one player who left us this summer.

The only way to salvage this window is announcing him before Liverpool announce Isak.

Exactly. They'll announce it on Friday.

To be fair though, our first team wasn't a huge problem, the issue was what happened when the backups came in. In that sense, we've made huge strides.

Age and cost is irrelevant if he scores 15-20 goals this season and gets us European football, we've only overpaid if he completely flops. If either him or Woltemade (preferably both) hit the ground running this season, we're in a stronger position as a squad compared to last season in my opinion.