Interpolic

So true, they haven't got a clue what to do about it.

Get the fuck in, Ben Arfa has absolutely fucking murdered these today.

Tiote?

Sort of had a feeling we should have made that spell count. Krul fucking around with crystal meth in his spare time by the looks.

Oof, nice move.

Cabaye's a dirty little fucker like.

"You might have thought you played well there lads, but let me use the next 15 minutes to explain why you should be frightened to death of Villa second half". Jokes.

Lovely stuff.

Listen to you, licking Pardew's arse. Pardew slurpa Erm... aye, rumbled...

Impressed with us so far, goes without saying but Remy gives us so much extra. Bench fairly strong at the minute too.

Yeah, taking notes will help him be better on the ball. What if he takes, ahem, footnotes? Good question, Keefaz.

It's not, I can't be arsed and need to do some work.

Another pointless post, well done.

Why have you totally taken the subject we were talking about and turned it into something else? Nobody was saying Cisse was this 'extravagant luxury' or we never needed more forwards? Sure you just try to cause tensions across the forum polic! We were simply debating if Ashley would spend in January and i was simply making a case of i think our position in the league isn't relevant in whether he would spend or not as he’s proved in the past when we flying high under Pardew and Ba was banging the goals in, we still added Cisse to the squad because the deal was financially right for the club regardless of whether we were desperate for him or not. Take your Andy Carroll along with your 35 million into another debate please. Wow, what an idiotic post. I'm saying we dithered in the summer and didn't bring in enough firepower with the Carroll money, so we corrected the mistake in January. Sound familiar? You can shove your tension up your arse, you're one of a few first-class whoppers on here at the minute. Yes but nobody was talking about dithering in the summer of 2012 or about Andy Carroll finances, you just randomly brought that up which has no case to be made for whether or not we will spend this January, just trying to get people to dance to your tune as everything has to revolve around you at the moment it seems. Don't even know why I’ve drawn myself into this tbh, you must have had enough fun chasing Ian around the forum criticising his posts acting like playground bully, just let people have their own opinions without shooting them down at every single opportunity. I call Ian up on one post after months of reading his drivel and I'm accused of chasing him around the forum, being nasty and calling him names. It's absolutely pathetic, he's in here contradicting people on the most minor shit day after day but is apparently immune to criticism himself, the poor bairn. Your little club will have to learn to be a bit more thick-skinned, since you're acting like everything's hunky dory when anyone can see that that's clearly not the case. Anyway my point was valid, that there were mitigating circumstances for us spending in each of those Januarys - the first one we had about £25m burning a hole in our pocket and the second one we were in danger of going down.

Why have you totally taken the subject we were talking about and turned it into something else? Nobody was saying Cisse was this 'extravagant luxury' or we never needed more forwards? Sure you just try to cause tensions across the forum polic! We were simply debating if Ashley would spend in January and i was simply making a case of i think our position in the league isn't relevant in whether he would spend or not as he’s proved in the past when we flying high under Pardew and Ba was banging the goals in, we still added Cisse to the squad because the deal was financially right for the club regardless of whether we were desperate for him or not. Take your Andy Carroll along with your 35 million into another debate please. Wow, what an idiotic post. I'm saying we dithered in the summer and didn't bring in enough firepower with the Carroll money, so we corrected the mistake in January. Sound familiar? You can shove your tension up your arse, you're one of a few first-class whoppers on here at the minute.

We spent the money on Cisse 12 months after receiving £35m for Carroll, having spent precisely zero on transfer fees for strikers after he was sold until then. Stop carrying on like Cisse was an extravagant luxury, we needed more forwards when Carroll was sold and 6 months after the event we only brought in Ba, leaving ourselves light for the umpteenth time. It was a good job Best came through for us in the way he did, but again we were gambling.

They've all played really well as well.

It's an asterisk, there are terms and conditions on the back of the shirt.

Might as well have not bothered with those first two sentences there. It's unreal. Ashley's taking money out of the club that could be spent on improving the team and you get the odd sap loving his work. Can't believe what I'm reading. If it were your 200m (or whatever the club cost him to date) I'm sure you'd not worry too much about recouping some of that cash. If I had £200m or over a billion or whatever it is then I'd be dead in a gutter after snorting 10 grams of coke from a stripper's arsehole. It's not comparable. He's in fact a very rich man, you still seem to be stuck on the idea that he'd have to spend fortunes of his own money to make us competitive when I'm saying we should have spent a bit of the club's own money to get our squad where it needs to be, but instead we might see ourselves falling even further behind the likes of Swansea and Norwich. I can see where you're coming from both with spending and with the stripper's arsehole. But I think Mike thinks he's going to see a return on the investment he made in January and he's going to want to see that return before investing further. If it gets dire and we need rescuing again in January he'll reluctantly do it. But I can see why he'd wait it out. I think he's an idiot then mate - if we were relatively successful we'd draw more prize money, more merchandising revenue, etc. He's running us on a shoestring when moderate investment might/would see us bring loads more money in. He's just not willing to go for that relatively short leap and that's what we're seeing.

you talk like anything would change transfer wise if Pardew left. Erm, are you missing the point entirely? I'm saying that the scouting needs to be aligned with what the manager wants to work with. and it won't ever be or to any football philosophy only to sell on value. By itself thats not the worst since even clubs like Man Utd prefer to buy players who they could at least make their money back most of the time (RVP is an exception to the norm) so long as its also being used as part of a plan which the manager agrees with on the type of footballer the club buys, this is not the case here and the squad shows this ridiculous imbalance. We sign technically good players, Graham Carr seems to like them. Pardew can't work with them. We need to change the manager or change the chief scout, not sure why this is such a difficult concept for you to comprehend. I'm not as convinced about the quality of the players. I was going to respond with a big post but since neither of us can be bothered then just get to the point man, because it's getting boring. We're signing shit players that are being managed by a shit manager, is that it?

Might as well have not bothered with those first two sentences there. It's unreal. Ashley's taking money out of the club that could be spent on improving the team and you get the odd sap loving his work. Can't believe what I'm reading. If it were your 200m (or whatever the club cost him to date) I'm sure you'd not worry too much about recouping some of that cash. If I had £200m or over a billion or whatever it is then I'd be dead in a gutter after snorting 10 grams of coke from a stripper's arsehole. It's not comparable. He's in fact a very rich man, you still seem to be stuck on the idea that he'd have to spend fortunes of his own money to make us competitive when I'm saying we should have spent a bit of the club's own money to get our squad where it needs to be, but instead we might see ourselves falling even further behind the likes of Swansea and Norwich.

you talk like anything would change transfer wise if Pardew left. Erm, are you missing the point entirely? I'm saying that the scouting needs to be aligned with what the manager wants to work with. and it won't ever be or to any football philosophy only to sell on value. By itself thats not the worst since even clubs like Man Utd prefer to buy players who they could at least make their money back most of the time (RVP is an exception to the norm) so long as its also being used as part of a plan which the manager agrees with on the type of footballer the club buys, this is not the case here and the squad shows this ridiculous imbalance. We sign technically good players, Graham Carr seems to like them. Pardew can't work with them. We need to change the manager or change the chief scout, not sure why this is such a difficult concept for you to comprehend.

Might as well have not bothered with those first two sentences there. It's unreal. Ashley's taking money out of the club that could be spent on improving the team and you get the odd sap loving his work. Can't believe what I'm reading.

this is it in a nutshell, I think even if you come away with a defeat, but it's clear everybody busted a gut for the cause, gave it everything they'd got, then you can still walk away satisfied (to a point) that all efforts were employed. It's being as weak as piss and entirely negative that drive everyone to distraction Unrealistic. This isn't 1996, it's 2013 and we're not Southampton Football Club.

I can't take that. I just can't. 20th richest club in the world iirc. 3rd largest crowds in the PL. But for some completely f***ed up reason you say we can't compete with the big clubs. And since not a single one of us expects to compete financially with Man City and Chelsea, I can only assume that by "big" clubs you mean the likes of Southampton, Fulham and f***ing Norwich. Just f*** off you cowardly, lying cockend. We all know that we could compete with them easily if we wanted, we're just owned by a thief who is creaming money out of the club and into his horrid, tatty, charva clothes shop. I take your points but I don't think there's anything wrong with the statement "We haven't got the finances of a big team," of itself. We're not bankrolled by Russian or Arab oil money. We don't have the commercial reach of Man United to sell an ungodly number of shirts in every corner of the globe. You're right that doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing better in transfer windows. But there's nothing wrong with the actual statement. There is something utterly wrong with the statement though. He's insinuating that there's a problem with the fans expectations. Ie that we're being unrealistic. And that's simply not what's happening, we just don't expect to have our manager come out and say we can't compete financially with f***ing Southampton ffs. The money has always been there for players the club feel are the right fit. Stop right there brah. This premise here- this is a completely unproven and unprovable proposition that just so happens to fit your agenda. It is also the claim of proven liars who admitted to deliberately misleading and deceiving fans in the past. Its a load of shit really. I'm sorry, do we not sign anyone unless it's on a free? Er not unless the money is made back in sales no. Hypothetically, if we'd taken all the Carroll money and signed say, Ozil... - Ignore that he'd probably not come here. - Ignore that he cost a bit more than we made on Carroll. - Ignore that the gap between now and selling Carroll. - Ignore the wage bill. But if we had gone out and signed a top player like that. Showing the ambition that we all want to see. A real player of Champions League quality. Would we now be a better team than picking players for 5m here, 3m there? Where do you think we'd have been finishing in the league? Not sure what question you're asking here. I demand a crack at a Europa League place (i.e. finishing in one of the positions that may open up to qualify for that competition) as an absolute bare minimum. Once we get there, then the minimum requirement changes. I'm not overly arsed about who the personnel is that gets us there. Why would I give the slightest fuck about that? I've never been in the least bit interested in getting excited about "marquee" (vomit) signings - I was fucking foaming with rage the day we signed Michael Owen because I knew the squad wasn't good enough to meet that minimum requirement. Nor is this one. Fair point. Misinterpreted what you were after. You're not so bothered about one big signing, you just would rather we have a negative net spend as a show of some kind of ambition. Personally, I don't care about that. If we make a profit or a loss doesn't bother me (so long as it's sustainable). I just want the players we bring in to improve the team. I agree that Europa League is a reasonable aim. I also think that with the likes of HBA, Cabaye (who we actively held on to), Colo (who we actively held on to), Cisse, Remy, Sissoko, etc we have the makings of a decent squad that can push towards that goal this year. Everyone dropped a bollock last season. Our January signings (despite our collective creaming over them) weren't amazing when it came down to producing results. Now with them getting bedded into the squad we can expect better. Er no, I'd rather the club was reinvesting the money that I and thousands of other supporters put into it, and reinvesting the gargantuan sums being thrown at them by the TV companies. Even if we finish second having spent nothing, it's not good enough because had we invested, it could have been first. Every single decision the club makes should be for the benefit of the football team and the betterment of results and performances. What you're looking for is socialism in the wealthiest football league in the world. You're valuing something non-tangible. Something that can't be seen on a balance sheet. You're wanting us to live up to our full potential, a benefit to our little society, rather than looking at success through the lens of profit and loss. You're valuing the art of being the best we can be above the almighty dollar. I'm with you entirely. I just don't think any owner would agree with us. Since we need to make do with someone owning us, I feel like I understand and somewhat agree with Ashley's outlook. So the summer was cool then? And whatever he decides to do going forward is cool? Dress it up as much as you want, it's bollocks and everyone knows it's bollocks apart from a handful of people who think they're cleverer than everyone else.