Dr Jinx

12 minutes ago, Candi_Hills said:

Willock might do a Kennedy if we sign him. Go from mint to shite in one summer.

Kennedy was never "that good" even in his first stint with us. We were just total gash down that side of the pitch. Willock just suits our counter attack style perfectly.

We have a better squad now going forward.

At the back we're ok. Murphy has been a revelation. I even think Lewis might come good eventually. Lejeune coming back will be important as Lascelles has question marks now and Schär is too reckless to depend on.

Interesting, it will all depend on what the court says in relation to their jurisdiction challenge. June 9th I believe is when they (the PL) submit their case for this.

If the judge rules against them which I expect him to (basically the argument that arbitration is dealing with all of this can't cover Mike Ashley's loss of earnings and damages claim imo as arbitration doesn't cover this)

If the same trend applies then the PL should want to settle early in this regard.

It's not unrealistic that we could have a takeover by end of July.

If we can keep ASM, sign Willock and replace Shelvey with someone decent I don't mind if Bruce is still there until a takeover happens. We should have enough to be just in the top 10, maybe higher.

The issue though is that he can't cope with injuries. There are no goals in this team if Wilson and ASM don't play. Willock balanced this out a bit but if we don't sign him the same problems will arise.

I can envisage a scenario where we get taken over, they stick with him out of loyalty for a season and he lucks into some class signings and we win the league.

The thread on here for him will still be calling him a fat useless cunt ?

See the thing is, last season.. I didn’t want him here but as we started picking up wins, especially after the first lockdown.. I thought.. ok, I don’t like him but I’ll give him a chance.. think many on here also had that point of view.

This season though, he’s made it personal.. having a go at the supporters for having “expectations”, telling us we should be expecting to be in a relegation struggle when just months earlier he was speaking about top 10.. he’s brought the hatred on himself. Some obviously needed no encouragement to give it to him but those on the fence were pulled in too.

He’ll never turn that around. Ever. What’s done is done. If he was truly smart he’ll use that good press to shift on to another club.

Remains to be seen how Arsenal will treat him once pre season starts, he’s definitely good enough to get in most PL teams though.

As I said before, some players (and managers) just click with a certain club. It’s lightning in a bottle and doesn’t come around too often, well not like this. He’s perfect for this club.

25-30 million should see Arsenal snap our hands off. Before his goal scoring exploits I’d have said under 20 million but it is what it is now.

The issue is our budget.

He can’t be worth very much and I suppose he still has international aspirations so he’ll want to be playing regularly somewhere.

I can see a situation where he just leaves the club by mutual consent. This season is as good as it’s going to get for him here.

His value is going up around 10 million per game..

What’s the financial difference between finishing 12th or 17th?

I’m not reading too much into that. Luke Edwards probably asked loaded questions which Wilson had to tow the company line when answering.

”When the team wasn’t playing well, do you think it might have helped that the fans weren’t there if they were booing?” and so on. Then he strings a bunch of separate comments together to make it look like a Bruce love in.

I know, an utterly butterly pointless game. And maybe it will be pointless for us too by full time. They should play the young ones coming through.

I actually have more interest in how Crystal Palace do, would be glorious if the dippers were done on the last day and Leicester pip them by a point.

I think if the legal challenge is about the conclusion that KSA should be a director and nothing else then we could be in some bother. The PL have a fairly straight forward series of links between MBS and PIF too, including evidence of influence over the PIF (that use of aircraft thing in the Khashoggi case for example)

The only way they are winning this case imho, is if they can prove that the outside influence from either Qatar (BeIn) or other PL clubs broke some rules that would override what I mentioned above regarding MBS/KSA

Sure there might be an anti-competition angle there, but enough to force the judge to rule everything in our favour?

I can easily see them coming out of this with a mild slap on the wrist and nothing to force them to change their position. Some of the arsehole journalists will call it a moral victory but ultimately it would achieve nothing.

The worst thing that could happen to him will be going back to Arsenal, being asked to do something totally different and losing all this confidence he’s built up.

I've long believed that both managers and players are just suited to some clubs more than others. He fits in here, if there’s a chance to do this deal the club have to. Pay the 30 million. Cheap when you think about his goals potential over a full season.

Expedited just means that it’s happening a bit sooner than the process normally would.

They do seem very keen to know the amount the club are claiming, my worry would be that they’ll see this amount as a calculated loss if they can pay the money but not have to change their stance on the takeover.

That would be worst case scenario, Mike Ashley getting what he wants and us being stuck with no investment.. and Steve Bruce..

Just now, B-more Mag said:

Close, but not exactly. The PL does want to argue the competition case should be thrown out for lack of jurisdiction. The CAT judge granted the PL an extension for the time to make that argument. 

He's basically saying Ashley's confidential document about losses isn't relevant enough to the jurisdictional issue for them to need to see it to make that arugument. 

I know mate, I re-read the document and edited what I wrote. Hard to find a positive spin on it unfortunately 

24 minutes ago, RS said:

Feels like PL are check-mating our every move. 

It’s more a timing issue. The club brought the wrong case forward first. There’s a more detailed breakdown of it in the other thread.. pissing on chips again I am.

A win for the PL today.

Edit. I re-read it again. 
 

I see this as a somewhat big win for the PL, I’ll explain why at the end.

To summarise:

The PL is challenging the jurisdiction of the court to hear this case as they say it’s basically the same as what’s being heard in arbitration.

The judge has given them until the 11th to submit its case as to why it should be thrown out. They mention there will be detailed evidence to support this claim. - likely more delay tactics. They want to bury it in litigation before it even gets going.

The judge denied them access to a confidential document - which seems to contain sensitive commercial information as to a loss of earnings and damages. - I don’t think it’s anything more than that. Ashley has had someone come up with a number and how they reached that conclusion. It’s not the smoking gun as we might have hoped for.

The judge basically says they should be able to submit its jurisdiction rebuttal without having that information at hand.

The judge also references that they are looking to delay arbitration too and is unsure if that will be granted. - no decision has been made as yet so it may not actually be starting in July. As it stands they need to disclose their evidence by the 9th June for arbitration.

Right.. so evidence for the arbitration needs to be submitted by the 9th June, I would imagine the club wanted the full disclosure of evidence for this case in their hands before they had to submit that case too. But that’s not going to happen now if the arbitration goes ahead as planned. NDM is basically going to court without knowing everything he needs to.

The anti-competition case may not even go ahead at all if the PL can submit a good reason why this court doesn’t have jurisdiction here.

I honestly can’t see any angle why this will have been good for the club.

I’m guessing the disclosure part hasn’t happened yet as we’re waiting on their response.

Tell me if I’m wrong but wouldn’t that be a two way street? Wouldn’t the club have to disclose the information on what their case is based on too?

Would the club also need to request the exact information they believe is relevant to the case? I can’t imagine the PL will give them the logins to their server and just let them dig around. 

If the PL decide to settle before it gets started, then we were right all along and they acted improperly, if they contest this I reckon they probably have a strong case that there was no wrong doing and will stick to their guns until this fizzles out completely.

6 hours ago, et tu brute said:

Don’t know who will agree, but I thought even in his first season here on loan, I thought the last couple of months his form went backwards after a great first three months. The lad has got talent, but there are certainly big question marks about his attitude. His second season on loan was basically a non event for the full time he was here.

Didn’t he have some awful stat in his second loan spell, like basically didn’t touch the ball once in a whole half of football or some shite like that.

The previous season I saw him at SJP for the win against Southampton and he was awesome. Really good day that.

Then saw him in the pre season against St Pats Athletic and he looked fat and unfit.

People can make excuses for him, as mentioned above about a second loan spell hurting his feelings, but bollocks to that, he’s supposed to be a professional footballer. The minimum he could have done was show up to pre season in some sort of shape.

His attitude is top notch.. fortunately Arsenal seem to have a preferred line up which doesn’t include him.. and in fairness, they destroyed us in the middle of the pitch when we played them, it’s not a weak spot for them.

20-30 million would go a long way to solving their deficiencies this summer too where I don’t expect many clubs to be spending big.

Sign him, someone to replace Shelvey, a left back and a goal scorer up front and we could have a half decent side next season, that’s if we keep everyone else.

Aye, I’m not worried about what Mike Ashley might or might not do. Cross that bridge if we ever come to it.

My take on it is there’s more to this deal for him than the 300 million. I’m sure there would have been other takers that could have scraped up the money if that’s all he was after.

It seems it’s very genuine this time that he’s fighting our corner on this, even if he’s doing it for other reasons.

I also think the way the supporters have shown they want KSA PIF at the club has formed a bond in terms of them waiting for this deal to happen. It certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed with them.

I suppose the reason this takeover won’t or isn’t happening is that the PL don’t want one of its member clubs being owned by a Country which gets such bad international press. They figure it will damage the brand.

Everything else being brought up (piracy etc) is just an excuse to do something they had already decided.

The only positive I can really pick out is that PIF/KSA haven’t bought anyone else yet.

The longer it drags out though, the more likely a more attractive proposition will come along.

Madness this game!

I don’t think people are going to have the appetite to vent at him if they were all let back into the stadium for the last home game.

People are going to be so happy to be doing normal things again there’s going to be a good atmosphere despite all the bullshit that’s gone on all season.

Comparing this to Man City is getting ahead of ourselves, we don’t know what kind of business model the consortium might potentially follow.

If Rafa Benitez is involved, his pipe dream of building up a whole youth system and top academy is far more exciting than just going and buying success imho..

We know he can do more with less than the other “top” managers. A couple of solid signings to go with the decent ones we already have at the club and year on year steady progress would do all of us I think?

Right now the club is really only set up for buying success for the first team, the infrastructure is not there to do the rest.