AyeDubbleYoo

There's always one! Try winding yer neck in and read it again. I've bought a £34 Student ticket, i'd imagine a kids ticket is a lot cheaper again. At the end of the day I aint paying £42 to watch a match that I can watch on the telly. In fact I wouldn't pay £42 even if it wasn't. £34 is still a lot of money but i'll pay it because i'd rather be there and because they've priced the tickets so high for this game it won't sell out anyway so they can be happy that they're getting my £34 instead of nowt at all. I was only joshing man. On a serious note though, the tickets are too expensive but the best way to object to that is not go. Sorry about that then mate but there are one or two of those types on here who would get on their high horse about it (naming no names!) so you never know! The prices for the games against the top teams (and Sunderland) are ridiculous. I paid £25 for Wolves the other week and the exact same seat in the Gallowgate corner for a televised game with Man Utd is an extra £17! Then back down to £25 for Birmingham which is a fair price in all honesty. Suppose it makes the season ticket seem better value. I know what you mean, in these lean times the prices start to seem less affordable. Will be interesting to see what the crowd is against Man Utd with it being on TV as well.

But that's to ignore that decisions about player sales aren't purely based on the effect on the squad... the club's finances also have to be considered. I wish we could just ignore money, never sell a good player and go around buying whoever we want. But we can't.

If he plays a part in all of the final six games then I'll think again, but at present we should be shunting him back to Villa at the end of the season for sure.

Think this sums up my view perfectly. Well it's slightly pointless debating about signings then, isn't it? When we win the club's being run properly, and when we don't it isn't. Just wait 'til 5pm on a Saturday and talk about the result.

There's always one! Try winding yer neck in and read it again. I've bought a £34 Student ticket, i'd imagine a kids ticket is a lot cheaper again. At the end of the day I aint paying £42 to watch a match that I can watch on the telly. In fact I wouldn't pay £42 even if it wasn't. £34 is still a lot of money but i'll pay it because i'd rather be there and because they've priced the tickets so high for this game it won't sell out anyway so they can be happy that they're getting my £34 instead of nowt at all. I was only joshing man. On a serious note though, the tickets are too expensive but the best way to object to that is not go.

Constant turnover of top players? Isn't that to exaggerate a bit? Carroll's sale was the right thing to do. The deal was terrific. And Enrqiue wants to be sold. That's only two players. Together they have generated a whopping £50 mill. Used wisely, we could buy us a hell of a team that will be much stronger than a team consisting of Carroll and Enrique and mediocre recruitments. Ashley's PR department would be so proud of you. Isn't what he said fact? Even Enrique hasn't left, so actually this is all based on one player sale.

Although it is a massively over inflated price due to him being English, the fact we were apparently 'reluctant' to sell and because it was a last minute buy in the window, with us knowing full well they would have a large sum of money in the bank following the Torres deal. I think we'll struggle to get anyone as good as him, but we should be able to get a more than able striker and another decent player for the money. What I have a problem with, is that we will only spend that £35m (allegedly going to cover wages and fees as well), yet we needed to spend around £20m this summer regardless of who we sold. Now it's looking like Jose will follow suit and leave so we will need another left back in as well. Not overly optimistic about the summer I must say. I'm fairly open minded, but it looks as if those predicting that we're going to become a selling club and MA just wants to asset strip us might actually be right? Who knows, we'll find out by September I suppose. Nooooooo....

You must know that makes no sense.

I want the squad to be strengthened as much as anyone, but that's not the criteria I'll use to judge whether £35m for Andy Carroll was too much to turn down. They're two different issues.

£35m is a massive amount of money, no matter how it's spent. Very few clubs in our position could turn down that sort of lump-sum income.

I agree they won't buy him, but TBF to Nolan he's had a better season than all of those.

Being hopelessly naive myself, I've got some sympathy for Punk's point. We have been through a lot of shit recently, but how many clubs' fans would say that? Hundreds I imagine. And at the end of the day we aren't much worse of on the pitch, if at all, and our team is not really much worse either, if at all. It does seem like some people only want to believe the worst will happen. I can understand why a bit, but it gets a bit tiring at times.

I was only having a laugh. I know!

I thought 'smuggling' was an appropriate verb to describe how Nolan gets most of his goals! Technically I may be wrong, didn't mean to start vocabulary wars.

I wondered that, but I couldn't be bothered to check if he was back.

Can't wait for him to smuggle a cheeky goal against Man Utd.

But at the same time, everyone has been saying for weeks that Joey Barton should never be played in CM again. So Pardew's options were limited, unless he went for something totally suicidal like Ryan Taylor in the middle. Really think we're reading too much into the Villa result... the main issue was the lack of decent players.

1-0 to Villa with the players we had available really isn't 'losing horrendously'.

He learned from the failed experiment playing 3-5-2. Moving Colo to CM in hindsight looks slightly dodgy, but as we've discussed before he obviously wanted to keep Barton out wide. He was hamstrung by injuries and suspensions against Villa, anything but a defeat would have been amazing. I don't think either are cause to worry that much.

32 and you're buying a kids ticket? That's low, just low.

if that's the case why wouldn't you want to sign him? Because hopefully we can get someone better.

Not saying I want us to buy him, but Kevin Doyle would be our best striker by some distance if we did sign him.

Honestly, man. I can't work out if you lot are lacking any sort of convcition or just completely and utterly thick. I agree with Ronaldo!

I'll live! Seriously though, I would rather we kept all our good players. Unfortunately we can't ignore the financial reality of our situation though. If we don't have an owner who is willing to pour in loads of his own money for signings, the club has to be run within its means. Anyway, as other people have said, I doubt the deciding factor for Enrique will be money.

One of the mercenaries? Not IMO, there are many reasons why he might want to leave. He is a very good player, in a position that doesn't have very many, he will no doubt have good options if he decides to move on.