ChrisMcQuillan

Strangely, this is one of the most composed defensive performances I can remember from us, especially when being pressed.

Perfectly happy with that. Boring, dull, professional. 80% possession. All the years of going out early in cup competitions, I don't mind being bored to death by a victory.

Man Utd home draw.

Schar you fucking beauty

Isak off…

Not sure this ever happened last season.

1.5/10

Birmingham signing Jay Stansfield from Fulham for £15m while they’re in League One. WTF?

Who’s up for a protest march?

Mutual termination of contract so that seems unlikely. I’m no expert though.

That and the tweet saying he's on a flight to Amsterdam made me lead to thinking that perhaps there was a reason for the MI5 detective work.

Paul Mitchell trying to work out what to say when Mark Douglas rings back to query what on earth "surprises meant".

I don't understand the significance of the time?

Yeah, I mean I'm pretty hysterical, but steady on @wallsendlad1952.

I think you're exactly right.

I struggle to accept that Marc Guehi is the only player in the entire world that would improve us that Howe would accept (and we can afford, given we have £70m to spend).

Back in the England squad.

Yeah, officially called up.

If we get lucky with injuries/suspensions, we won't miss Anderson. Tonali coming back is the big factor here, but I'm trying to deal with this from a transfer perspective and not a squad strength perspective. But he's a good player and sometimes offered us a different dimension when needing to change a game. I'd compare Osula and Minteh, since we had neither of them last season. I think I'd prefer to have kept Minteh than have Osula, but time will tell. Ritchie and Dummett are what they are, and possibly with no Champions League/Europe, neither would have been required to appear this season. So we have Kelly who's an upgrade on Dummett, and Osula who's an upgrade on not having Wilson available half the season, but unsure whether he's an upgrade on what Minteh might have offered us this season. There's different ways of looking at it, admittedly, but as it stands it's not looking like a strengthening in the transfer window. Still time to change that.

Versus last season (so Hall doesn't count), we've lost Anderson, Ritchie, Dummett and Minteh. We've brought in Kelly and Osula. I'm assuming Vlachodimos won't play for us, and treating Ruddy the same as Karius. I'd argue that even if other clubs hadn't changed their squads at all, we've weakened slightly so far.

Any of that Xanax going spare?

To hell with all this.

Now I'm pissed off. We've had a shocking window.

Kepa to Bournemouth.

95-ish according to Wikipedia.