Hughesy

I've always said I don't think he's that good. Not a massive fan of him in a midfield two as I don't think he's fit or mobile enough.

The guy isn't good enough to get away with that kind of crap.

Spot on. Embarrassing reading here today.

Which in itself is worrying. Or encouraging on the basis that we haven't allowed them to play well?

Really not sure what people expecting. Spurs have been the best team in the league over the last seasons and they created fuck all in the first half. Could easily have come away with a point but for Shelvey's idiocy.

The f***? A scissor tackle from behind is often going to result in injury. Standing on someone's ankle isn't close to as dangerous.

Kane's tackle on Lejeune is more of a red than the Shelvey 'stamp' and Ritchie's tackle.

Think we're doing great so far. They've had a lot of the ball but mainly in harmless areas.

Yes, in the form of an interest free £120m loan that is never being paid back. In that case, it'd be cheaper to borrow the money from the bank. Interest payments would be far lower than not receiving the value of the advertising.

Yep - de Boer isn't nearly as good as people were making out.

For me, it's the desire to only spend what we currently have in the bank. Ashley and co seem to regard this as great business sense, but it's fucking brainless. If you have a guaranteed income stream (which we have), you don't literally need to wait for the money to hit your account to spend it.

Not in any way excusing the lack of business done so far, but I am wondering whether Ashley and co think it's worth waiting until the end of the window to see if you can pick up some players from top 6 where the selling club subsidises the player's wages. Probably quite likely that we will have to do the same to offload our crap.

The local player getting more hatred is such nonsense.

He's quite good, isn't he?

People will decide at some point that it's not worth paying for? Hardly inconceivable that subscription prices will continue to rise (which they have to for it to be viable as a commercial product) and people will decide they can't be arsed paying £1000s to watch an increasingly unfair competition where it becomes the Top 6 and the rest. Of course, the bubble can burst. Anecdotally I know of lots of football fans (not part timers) who have given up Sky and viewing figures are down. People might decide that watching Stoke and West Brom play boring football in a desperate attempt to stay on the gravy train is only worth a certain amount.

Has there ever been an enjoyable Ashley transfer window? The whole thing just becomes so tiresome. I'd love to be able to just ignore it completely, but given the precariousness of Rafa's position, I can't.

Having done some Youtube scouting, quite like the look of Florin Andone at Deportivo and Gerardo Moreno at Espanyol.

Agree - it really isn't difficult - they have a guaranteed income stream. This can easily be offered as security (if it isn't already) against borrowing more money. The idea that we need money in our account before doing business is ridiculous.

We NEED to sell because we've got far too many players...far more than you can register. No club in the country would continue buying players without shifting their deadwood. We are no different in that respect. We are very different in other respects like, but shifting players on before we bloat the squad even more is massively important. so naive man. How many players do Chelsea have, about 40 thousand or something int it? Loan s**** like Haidara out and pay half of their wages if we have to. How is that naïve? It's absolutely right, and probably the reason Rafa isn't kicking off. He knows the squad needs to be trimmed. It's easy enough to say we should be doing these deals as favours to other clubs, but if there's interest there for a permanent deal, then why not explore that option? The squad needs to be trimmed, it also desperately needs another 4 or 5 players of Premiership quality. I'll let you decide which is more important. Totally agree with this - find it amazing that all of Ashley's gambles with NUFC take the form of not spending any money and just hoping for the best. Obviously no-one is sure of the exact financials (although I fail to see how there can't be any money available - whether it's actual cash or borrowing against guaranteed future income), but the long term benefit of spending an extra £20-35m now and bringing in 2-3 good players could make a huge difference. It's just too risky not to spend and potentially become a yo-yo club.

Was widely reported as a 4 year deal at the time, but we did announce it as a 'long term deal' - which could mean .com are right. Surely we didn't give the f***er 6 years. I thought a 5 year contract was the longest you could give a player anyway?

Blow for the Guardian but I guess there's no need for them to be under anyone's umbrella when they could be making money off it directly. Still prefer the Football Ramble. True - I can't imagine the Guardian pays them brilliantly so they might as well go out and make a bit more money from it. I assume it will essentially be the same show, just without the Guardian journalists (who didn't always make up that much of the podcast anyway). I do however refuse to accept that there could be a better football podcast out there than Football Weekly. It had James Richardson and is therefore automatically the best football podcast.

Bit of a disaster for the Guardian - http://www.football365.com/news/exclusive-james-richardson-to-leave-guardian-football-weekly but at least Richardson is going to keep doing podcasts.

Signing of Perez always seemed a bit strange - 17m for a 27/28 year old with one decent season never made a huge amount of sense. What did you make of him?

Think Josh King would be a huge risk - one decent season in his career to date and, statistically at least, slightly unusual in terms of his stats - http://statsbomb.com/2017/07/joshua-king-and-the-hot-foot/

Wouldn't go for King - has all the hallmarks of a one season wonder. Not convinced by Gray either to be honest.