Gottlob

Harvey Barnes? Might as well be Hilary Benn for all the good that did us!

I was around at the time and have absolutely no idea what 'Oldham 96' means. Maybe it's because I'm forgetful or maybe it's cause, you know, I actually have a life and haven't addled my brain with endless minutiae drawn from old football matches!

I agree with Yorkie and AyeDubbleYoo. Gordon is a gobshite who presents as an intellect, but thankfully the likes of Kid Icarus will be around to cut him down to size.

Got to say that my favourite thing about deadline day and maybe the whole transfer window was reading our signings being angrily described as a couple of 'bum boys' only here to placate Howe and Tindall.

Over the past two summers we've signed Tonali, Barnes, Livramento, Hall, Kelly, Osula and you can add Vlachodimos if you'd like for the first team squad. We've spent around £170-190 million on those players, and of the lot only Tonali has seemed like a certainty for the first eleven. So I'm not sure I buy the sincerity or the rationale behind the argument that we're only looking for the best of the best, ready-made players who can immediately enhance the first team. It just sounds like hot air in the place of serious squad building.

An injury to Pope or Schar and we are now severely limited for half of the season. I personally don't think our defence looks great as it stands, and while it's on Howe to improve our ball retention and turn things around away from home, if we do start to control matches more and force other teams to sit back, I reckon we'll struggle more than we'd like to break teams down with attention once again turning to our lack of quality wingers. The plus side obviously includes the return of Tonali, a really talented player who has the capacity to galvanise us out on the pitch, and I think Kelly and Osula were smart pickups. We do have a strong squad with everyone fit. But with Howe expressing his disappointment with our transfer business several times this summer and talking about players feeling unsettled, the end of the transfer window has provided nobody with a lift and it only increases the pressure on our current squad and coaching staff to perform this season.

I think what a lot of people forget is that stuff like this takes time. To be successful you've got to appoint the right people, buy the right tools and only then can you start to think about luring him to the embassy.

I agree, that's why I'm so pleased that we signed the injury-prone backup something or other Lloyd Kelly for £150,000 a week.

He's 21 years old and has just moved to a new team. Descriptions like 'competent', 'short of top level', 'decent', 'solid', 'average', etc. would probably be generous for some of the recent performances by Lewis Hall and Tino Livramento, and they'd also be more than apt for the likes of Dan Burn, Emil Krafth and our new signing Lloyd Kelly. I think Anderson would have been a useful member of the squad. He's added a bit of grit to his game, passes the ball nicely and has better close ball control than most of our midfielders, which is something we lack especially in the final third, plus he'd have been another option down the left if we're looking to free up Barnes and Gordon. I think it's a shame we had to sell him.

Pope needed his hands to save that one!

Isn't Madueke just an old and injury-prone Minteh?

I've never heard of anybody needing to 'access' a club crest. This isn't the Narnia chronicles and touching a badge sends nobody into a tailspin by which they end up inside the wonderful world of Oz.

He looks like a cross between Richard Pryor, one of the members of 3T and Hank Worden who played the senile waiter in the original Twin Peaks series.

We've appointed a sporting director and a performance director and a lead coach for the under 16s, but shouldn't we look into some sort of master illusionist or military specialist if we spend half of our time throwing up smokescreens?

Count me among the ranks of the unsurprised and what's more this is a point of great excitement for me personally as all of the dreams I've ever had for the club begin to come to fruition. On the other hand does it seem to anyone else like the Saudis have done her dirty, after all those years she spent helping them enter polite society through the backdoor? The more I think of it the more I'm angered by it, but at least we've managed to keep Bruno.