KaKa

I'm not surprised to hear this. If he stays in the Prem he is going to stay at Newcastle. The pull that his agent will be thinking of will be regarding Barca who are looking to replace Lewandowski. Particularly because the wages on offer will be massive too. If it ends up being a move to Barca for the price we're after. Fair enough IMO. The likes of Liverpool and Arsenal have no chance I reckon.

Think Hendo is fine as an alternative to Rice, for someone to sit in midfield. Replace him with Wharton once he gets back up to speed down the line.

Lovely feet from Eze. Great goal.

Great goal. Lovely play just then.

Yeah, you can see they're both not as used to going on the outside. Early in the half still though. Let's see.

He's switched them to the more traditional style.

England look a lot more threatening with two direct wingers going at fullbacks. Also think Lewis Skelly has been really good inverting from left back, allowing both Jude and Rogers to get forward. I'm liking this setup today.

I'm not even against going big on the odd players, provided it makes sense within whatever budget we have, and so it doesn't come at the expense of strengthening the team/squad in other areas. This is the key thing for me.

We are still at the early stages of smaller clubs now being able to attract higher calibre managers and also now having the infrastructure behind the scenes to identify and scout players all over the globe. We are going to increasingly see these clubs start to embarrass the so called bigger clubs going forward. Especially those throwing hundreds of millions at them for players they signed for a tenth of that. Thereby building those clubs up further. I really hope we continue to build up our scouting and recruitment and get better and better at identifying players we like within a budget that allows us to build up our squad to challenge long term. If we fall into the trap of just spending much more money on players we have waited on other clubs to discover first, it's not going to go well at all IMO. Finding good players at a value suited to the club building a strong squad, doesn't mean just buying inexperienced kids either, neither does it mean these players will need years to adjust. These are always assumptions that are made when these sorts of things are discussed.

Typical "top club" glazer.

City have Haaland. They will not go for him. As for the others, their teams are not that much better than ours for him to push to leave for footballing reasons, no chance. This kind of thinking is typical of what we see from the media and the refs week in and week out. Always fawning over these clubs.

These guys are all stuck in the past. That period when Wenger, Ferguson, Rafa, Mourinho were kind of the initial wave of top managers from abroad and everyone else was still hiring the likes of Pardew, Pulis, Allardyce, Bruce, O'Neil etc are over. That would have been such a huge pull and advantage. Now someone like Iraola is at Bournemouth. If we are able to offer Isak a competitive salary I don't see him pushing to join another Prem club. He's just won a trophy playing in a side that beat Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool on the way there. If he's ever tempted by a club it will be by a Barcelona.

Croatia missed two pens and France let them back In it!

Yeah, he was fantastic

What a match up this has been!