Chris_R

Remind me who we thought Keith Pattinson was on here, again?

I get that he wants to leave etc and I would too, 3x your salary would tempt anyone, but to describe it as "life changing" seems a little odd. Surely the guy is already a millionaire and could easily never work again from tomorrow if he wanted, living very comfortably through to extreme old age without wanting for anything ever again. I'm not sure to what extent this will "change his life".

We need to stop wasting time with players who don't want to come or clubs that don't want to sell. We're shit, there's literally hundreds of players will make us noticeably better. Move on.

We need to move on. They'll otherwise just keep stringing us along and upping the price. We're shit, there's plenty of players will improve us, he's not the only one.

No. Just no. I loved what Rafa did with us but we must move forwards, not backwards.

What, are you worried the rest of them might start underperforming like?

You can't show more than one goal if you don't have more than one shot on target in the match. Just not good enough on any level.

Yeah we've not been bought by one man, but by a business. A business can't get bored. Maybe they could change strategy, but their whole country is geared around their "Vision 2030" so it feels unlikely.

Slight difference between "Indonesian rich guy" and PIF though. Our owners could lose £10bn and not even blink.

Ok, so what do you think he should have said instead?

And don't forget that simultaneously we overpaid for Wood

Which bit do you think is inaccurate, and what should he have said instead?

Maybe we're trying to confuse the opposition? Rather than having one or two weak areas which they can focus on attacking in the build up to the game, we're going to make planning against our weak spots impossible by the ingenious tactic of being shit at absolutely everything.

Where are you finding these stats? I'd find that kind of thing fascinating to have a look through.

Absolutely outrageous stats there. Honestly, I'd think that if you just stood still in the middle of the pitch you'd have 1 interception per game.

I don't see why one bid should detract from making others except in the real closing stages where we're writing out the actual contracts and things might bottleneck there. Early stage enquiries though, we should be able to be doing loads at a time.

Jeddah I found to be quite beautiful and fairly liberal.

I cannot stress this enough but alcohol just cannot be bought in Saudi at all. Not in the shops, not in the hotels, nowhere. It's a dry country. It's not just hard to get, it just doesn't exist as a consumer product. Finding a hotel in Saudi that sells alcohol is about as plausible as finding a hotel in the UK that sells heroin. Maybe he got some illegal homebrew off a work colleague or maybe at a push a hotel employee, and drank it in his room (Something I did once and it genuinely felt like I was doing a drug deal and I decided then and there I really didn't need alcohol that badly to ever do that again), but that's about as far as it'll go.

Yeah I'd play Willock too, but I still think there's a decent player somewhere in Almiron. Whether it's too late for him here or not though is a big question. I suspect it might be, because our trajectory if we stay up might make him superfluous.

Willock this season has been a victim of a change in position. He's been dropped to CM and he doesn't have any of the attributes required to play there. He desperately needs to play at 10, but so does Almiron and obviously only one can. We need a winger and at least one central midfielder to allow these two to not play in the wrong position where they just stink things up. I won't judge anyone too harshly when played out of position.

Milenkovic excites me a lot, from the little I've seen. I'd love to see him come.

I'd challenge that a little. All we can really say is that we've been very public about the things we've heard about. It's kinda hard to hear much about the non-public things we may have done, because by definition they've not been made public. There might be loads of things we've just never heard about. Also who knows why things leak? It's not necessarily us being public about things, indeed we have no vested interest in making anything public. Agents and selling clubs have far more to gain by publicising deals because they could potentially draw in other suitors who will pay the club or their player more. We gain by keeping things private. So I doubt that any of the publicity around any of our deals have been even remotely our doing.

By "someone like Schar", you mean Clark, right?

Whilst I get your general point, aren't you forgetting that EVERY player in the Spanish leagues has a release clause? Sure, those clauses might be high enough to put most teams off, but they do 100% exist. So losing 2 CBs is far from impossible. In fact, it could be impossible to keep them.

What, Jordan Henderson? I'd love that just for the RTG meltdown if he helped us stop up. They're heads would implode.