Stottie

Well, if nothing else, thanks to Fulham we can now dismiss those posts on here that said Gayle was worth "10M" 15M is only the first bid.... Lots of options, but only 36 hours or whatever to get something done. Back to Arsenal for Perez? Origi on loan? Praet and Remy on loan as backup with Joselu first choice? You expect Gayle to get a full medical wherever he's going, so selling him first may only leave minutes to sign a replacement. The deals will have to be done at the same time. Still hoping for a keeper myself.

3 out?? Three Loans: Sels, Armstrong, Toney. Eight Gone: Anita, Guoffran, Mbabu, Ameobi, Murphy D., de Jong, Rivière, and Hanley (ish). Rafa's only been here for a year and a half, so the transformation of the squad, esp. in terms of deadwood out, has been very impressive.

Maybe we need a video contrasting him with Souness's super CM signing for us, Amdy Faye.

Yeah to rival Reading for 7.5M. He put up Matt Ritchie-type numbers last season, so that is a bargain. I wonder what the plan is. Gayle?

If this is an echo of Rooney, I suspect Fat Fred had an agreement with Everton and was making fake bids to raise the price Man U paid.

Yep. We were also comfortably winning in the last two against both Spurs and West Ham, making them extra brainless. A lot of punditry seems to be knee jerk or trotting out cliches in place of insight. The cliche Mitro has created for them is that he's violent and needs to be watched. It's hard not to laugh when he kicks a keeper up the arse in a friendly, but it just marks his card further.

Ditch the ginge!

As I've said before, I rate Dwight Gayle. He must be worth as much as or more than Andre Gray who just went for 18M. Gray has 9 PL goals and like Gayle is already 26. I would question whether Huddersfield, Brighton, and Swansea (once Llorente heads to Chelsea) have a striker as good as Gayle. If Rafa can pull off some serious wheeler-dealer move though by selling him, I hope he goes for it. If it is Origi, we would be a perfect loan destination for Liverpool because we look a solid team who could potentially take more points off Liverpool's rivals with more quality up front. Goals for us against Top 6 sides would be more use to Liverpool than goals for them in the final minutes of games where they are already ahead.

I didn't see the whole Huddersfield game, but I thought he looked good against Spurs before that. I guess he'd have got on as soon as Shelvey was off if we'd not used two subs already.

In the first three games, Swansea have taken the fewest shots and hit the fewest crosses in the league. Their possession stat has been low, but not as low as us. So not a lot going forward from them so far.

Win 3-0, the kneejerk pressure switches to de Boer, Bilic, and Wenger, and what do we get? This, more speculation and nonsense to think and worry about. It does your head in. fwiw, to me, Gayle is worth 20M to a potential suitor like Leeds who just sold a lesser player for 15M. I think Gayle is a PL quality striker. Since we rushed him back last year, it might be premature to write him off as "injury prone". There would have been less pressure to get him back in had we bothered to sign more creativity (Townsend) for Murphy and Mitro.

It might be a case of Rafa needing to convince Jovetic to come. I wonder if Sevilla would be interested in Ayoze....

With the game situation, there is no need to reevaluate the incident. There was only going to be one winner of the match. That said, Mitro is a liability whose reputation ensures that no referee will get stick for red carding him for anything that can be broadly interpreted as violent conduct. We should bite any club's hand off who'll give us 8M for him. Him gone will be one less thing to have to think about.

He's clearly got a bit of the radge about him, but he channeled it positively today and made a big contribution to the result. I think that first goal was vital, and Ritchie played a big part in it. He did so for the second too, but West Ham were on the ropes by then. He doesn't talk in such flowery terms, but I reckon Rafa knows about momentum and positive energy, and on his game, Ritchie can provide them, lifting the other lads in the team.

Fwiw, for anyone 40 odd watching the US coverage, Steven Caldwell is 36, 37 next month.

West Ham are shit, but the lad looks quality. Seriously!

FT. I said before the match that someone needed to step up without Shelvey and Gayle, and they all did, but especially MoM Ritchie, our next main man. Well done son! If you need a six-word summary, the team that wanted it won. Bilic has to be next for the sack if that is the best he can get out of them. So we've got a couple of weeks to get a keeper and striker in. Kenedy too, to bolster the left side. FFS please do it. We can't expect every team in the league to be as weak as West Ham today.

I would say I feel sorry for their fans who've travelled a long way to see this shower of shit, but they got a free stadium off the taxpayer and their owners and Karren Brady are cunts, so scratch that one off straight away.

All our Christmases at once, this game! It's the 2-0 that saved the Lick all over again. Thank you West Ham.

Braindead bodycheck with marginal elbow from Mitro asks question of thankfully non-incompetent referee. Wtf is he thinking.

I know the odds are short, but Bilic next for the sack looking like a good bet.

Brilliant goal. Great persistence and fantastic finish. Well done lads!

Time for Aarons, I think.

In this situation, with Shelvey and a fit Gayle, we'd score the next goal. Which we nearly just did anyway.

Blob doing his best to tee them up with a block back into the danger area.