oldtype

:lol:

I think it's reasonable to accept that a large part of Pardew's salary is performance based, it's Ashley's MO and that's what the rumours were at the time (and also the rumours as to why Hughton was reluctant to sign the contract he was offered in the Summer) - relatively low basic pay with big bonuses for achieving performance targets. Now of course for a manager of a football club, the performance he can most directly affect is the team's progress in the league and cups. Given an agreed budget, and control of the incomings & outgoings, that's fine and acceptable, however if the management above you is going to, for example, constantly try to cut costs, and get rid of your biggest resources in achieving your targets for the year (and the bonuses associated with that), you're going to get rightly p*ssed off that the targets you thought were achievable are being sabotaged. So if that were the only way of achieving the bonuses you were relying on to make your wage competitive, you'd quit. The management at Ashley's companies are incentivised by the company's profit margins. If they can perform their jobs at an adequate level with lower costs (ie in our case the target is to stay in the Premier League), then they are contributing to the profit margins. They may get a slap on the wrist for too many complaints, but they probably don't get bonuses for customer satisfaction. It's not really a stretch to think that it would be part of Pardew's contract to get a bonus if the club makes a profit rather than finish higher in the table. That doesn't make any sense. If he doesn't have any influence on transfers there's nothing he can do directly to influence the club's profit margin at the end of the season... ...other than finishing higher in the league In any case, would make absolutely no sense for him to have a bonus based on profit margin.

I'd like him to prove that he can do anything of consequence in a competitive football match first. Desperately want him to succeed but so far we've seen nothing.

you dont like it? it's f***ing lunacy. 2 were available on a free and one had a release clause under 5 million and has never played in england, i'd have been f***ing livid if we'd spent 30m on those 3 It really wasn't necessary to pick out and respond to the most utterly inconsequential part of my post.

I don't like the claim that "people would be happy if we paid 30m for Ba, Cabaye, and Marveaux" but I do believe that the lack of transfer fee contributes significantly to people badly underrating Ba. Fact of the matter is he was one of the most in-form players in the league for the last third of the season and scored in excess of 1 in 2 for an abysmal West Ham side. I realize that stats are only useful when they suit your opinion(), but his form for the last three months of the season pisses all over Carroll's, in both goals scored and general play. I don't consider myself qualified to judge conclusively whether he's better or worse than Carroll, but just because we got him for free doesn't mean he's suddenly unexciting.

We're all disappointed we didn't sign him, but in a way I feel that a lot of people are overrating him. That's understandable given that he put two past us and then went on a ridiculous run of form towards the tail-end of the season when everyone was watching. Regardless, he was hardly setting the league alight all season and was really just the best player on a poor Wigan team. I've no doubt he'd improve us, but not signing him is not the end of the world.

Same, but I don't think it rings true. Similar with the Bridge/Shorey links, it just seems like lazy linking to me. Can't see Ashley sanctioning the signing of any of those players. Expensive, high-wages, old, English international. Might as well be rat poison for Ashley man!

Most clubs in the league could be relegated if you erased their 3 best players, up to and including teams like Everton and Villa.

They've now shipped three goals each to Hull City, Guangdong(a Chinese club), and the Malaysian-League All-Stars. No idea where their season is going to go but it's got to be dramatic one way or another. Either a title challenge out of the blue or a complete f***ing disaster that has Dalglish sacked by January.

Shocking Tiote sent off.. Jose has scored twice but both own goals, his 2nd was a 25 yard screamer. If this happens it'll be spooky. Right down to his celebration after the second where he ripped off his top to reveal a Liverpool shirt and walked off the pitch with Kenny Dalglish

It's perfectly reasonable in the abstract, but we have a wage cap and ultimately if we're going to bother setting one at all we're going to have to be willing to enforce it.

That £10m was just for the striker though, there was the Neil Taylor interest that coincided with it at the time. So that's at least £11m for pure transfers and goodness knows how much else when every other aspect under the sun has been included in the figure (which tends to be the way we're doing things on here these days). As I keep saying, I'm happy enough with another quality striker, cover for left-back, a replacement for Jose if he goes and then a further centre-back and right-back. However, things should have been better than that considering the wedge we got for Carroll. Can't see more than two from that list coming in, which isn't enough IMO. I seem to be one of the few, but it is genuinely the backline I'm most worried about. I'm perfectly happy with the five senior ones we do have (even Danny boy), but there's literally f*** all backing them up. i share the concerns about the back line, not only is there f*** all back up Taylor is a liability and will be found out for about the 70th time in the first few games. An extra CB is probably a bigger priority than an extra winger at this point. A diverse backup defender (i.e. a not terrible version of James Perch) would also be preferable.

None of those signings are even remotely likely. They couldn't have done a better job if they were trying to pick four players whom we conclusively won't sign. Just hurts the credibility of the local press in my eyes, had me thinking for most of this summer that they actually had some idea what was going on.

Might as well just stop worrying about transfers entirely and just watch the football. It's never going to go the way we want it to, especially under this regime, all these windows do is cause fans undue stress. At the end of the day we'll still be putting 11 players on a pitch that we can cheer on, and those 11 players, no matter how shit, will have a chance at winning. That's how I prefer to think of it now anyway.

There seems to be so much less emphasis on the manager and so much more on the board these days anyway... On an emotional level it barely seems to matter whether it's Pardew or some other non-entity in the manager spot.

Who? Who?Huh? Who? Who? Who? Hey, at least Riise isn't that "who?"

Who? Who? Who? Who? Who?

What would our level of spending have been if we didn't sell Carroll? Assuming we were looking at a similar outlay to last summer, we'd probably be spending about 3~4 mil and filling up the rest with frees and loans. From that standpoint, and I'm aware that this is vastly simplifying things, we'd probably have been able to sign Cabaye, Ba, Marveaux, and Abeid with or without the Carroll sale. So essentially we traded Carroll for whichever players we end up signing from today to the end of the transfer window. It starts with Erdinc, hopefully there will be a couple players added on to that to make the bottom line look even remotely respectable. You can't really fault Mike Ashley for wanting to repay his loan, he's got no passion for this football club and it's his money, he can do whatever he wants with it. It's certainly annoying for us as fans but no point dwelling on it I suppose.

Crouch and Bridge? They're not even trying to hide that they're just pulling names out of their asses now.

It's not. Go edit it out yourself

It wouldn't have been a sure-fire thing by any stretch of the imagination. The excess baggage is huge. A lot of the dressing room that he fell out with the first time around is still here. Could just as easily have come here and gone back into Insomnia-mode because he wasn't being started ahead of Jonas/Ben Arfa/Marveaux for whatever reason. I suppose it's pointless speculating now.

I share this hope as well. Last time in a transfer window in that we were desperate for more players (Jan 2009) we've lost Given and N'Zogbia and got Nolan and R. Taylor. I don't share the hopes. We're "desperate" for new players every single transfer window. Don't be silly. January 2009 was even worse, though. In a time where Barton and Beye just got injured to only add to our huge injury list that time. I can't even remember when the last time we didn't "absolutely have to sign four~five quality players this window." When the team is in less dire straits the expectations just go up to match that.

I'm confused. Are they no longer setting transfer windows ablaze?

I share this hope as well. Last time in a transfer window in that we were desperate for more players (Jan 2009) we've lost Given and N'Zogbia and got Nolan and R. Taylor. I don't share the hopes. We're "desperate" for new players every single transfer window. Don't be silly.

Who is, at least in the UK, a better candidate? Sturridge. Not that I don't rate Carroll, I do, but think Sturridge has it all. Hernandez, Suarez, Ballotelli, Sturridge, Walcott? Just off the top of my head?