Abacus

And Steve Barnes, the club detective.

Bad shout City stealing our player.

Body language is terrible from the West Ham players.

Never mind.

Yeah, let's just buy Mbappe instead.

I'd pay the extra £500, buy both and weld them together.

Right. So then we sign someone, string them along and then still say no at 1 minute to midnight on deadline day. They started the war.

This is so much more fun than all the transfer stuff.

@Dr Venkman not sure about this bid.

For him? It would prove he wasn't telling pork pies in his post. For the club, it would not change a thing, either on the asking price or his contract, both of which we need to hold fast on. For me, it would slightly change how badly I viewed him if and when he is reintegrated. If we really did promise him something and didn't follow through, I'd boo him a bit less. Though there's a counter argument to that in not washing your dirty laundry in public if there's any semblance of truth in his statement. I'm not saying I do want that response from him, I'm saying that if he's telling the truth the club statement pushes him into denying it and carries the circus on.

You'd think Isak now will need to respond with evidence of what he was promised, by who, and when that was. His message has been called lies by the club. Regardless there was talk that we had tried to discuss a new contract at some point this summer and his agent walked away. Meaning even if there was some verbal agreement to discuss it, then it was met.

Some of the papers this morning running with Isak's statement as their main back page headline. Martin Hardy stating that "the club have been approached for comment", so it was obviously written before the club statement. I think that's one reason the statement had to be made. They can just point to it and say "here's our statement" rather than have to repeat it dozens of times. Great statement regardless, though.

Am I dreaming or has Luke gone full on Henry IV part 2? I've got about 8 pages to read back through though.

Let's do a straight swap for Haaland. Isak fits their style of play better. Only half joking

If he's available on a loan, with an option, I wouldn't be dead against this. We're in Chris Wood territory here of just needing a body up front to pull defenders around. Until Isak comes crawling back. And actually maybe those two wouldn't be so bad with Jackson as fresh legs / cover for injuries.

He's surely allowed to block the ball by leaning into it, though? Oh, I don't know. I've had a long day and a glass of wine. Don't normally disagree with you but it seemed very harsh to me. Off to watch Alien Earth series instead, and see if Peter Walton can make sense of the football side of things by agreeing with whatever it is the referee has done in the paper tomorrow.

Never a penalty for me. Leeds the better side but still, I'd be furious if that was given against us. If it was given for us, I'd be delighted but still think we'd gotten a dodgy decision our way. Neither team looked like they could score in open play, though.

Or he's told the Sweden manager one side of the story because Isak's reputation is in the dirt right now. Past caring really, the Sweden manager just wants his goals and what else could he say.

He'll maybe be thinking that if he doesn't attend the awards gala that it's just an extension of his strike. A public come and get me message. Or perhaps he just doesn't want cheap canapés to a pointless ceremony nobody cares about or the focus on him the whole time or be asked questions, else he'll shrivel under the camera lights like a vampire.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing and it's never as simple as this, but we should have tied this one up a while back. Maybe we tried to, don't know. I just remember reports of a £25m offer and reports of them needing a replacement first. Whatever, £40m or so for a striker with probably 4 years left to replace Wilson and then plenty of time left for Brentford to get a replacement would have worked far better than letting everyone else get sorted first. Not convinced at all with either Jackson nor Hojlund - what we need is someone that can actually score goals. Which we do already have one of, even though annoyingly he's turned out to be a fool.

It would from our perspective - the risk of bankruptcy goes which is it's supposed purpose. But it wouldn't get voted in because some clubs who can't afford that blank cheque would then never be able to compete and are quite happy that there are limits, even if they will always be feeder clubs. And some are determined not to allow others to compete hence the rushed rules to stop us taking away their champions league spots. I'm more sympathetic to the first group than the second, even if being a perpetual also ran isn't much fun. The thing is, the fans of those clubs should realise there will never be any chance to compete and even if they got a dream rich investor they still wouldn't be allowed to.

I agree that there has been a turning point in the media about his behaviour. Every serious pundit has said that he is being completely unprofessional. On balance I still think we have to stick to our guns and not let him go now. Too many negatives with caving in now. I don't much care about him as a person after how he has acted, but I do care about his goals and where the club finishes. So on any new contract, I did like the idea of no increase in the base salary but heavily performance based add ons should he stay for the season with a release clause. He'd have to play well enough to earn that release clause and in hindsight it's probably what should have been offered back in January to kill all this noise.

I think I have mentally checked out on all of this circus right now, whatever match it is I am struggling to care. We played well yesterday but it's not really the release it used to be. Fair play to those that still do and have a blast this season.

He basically just reads a management / leadership type book every week and then tries to cram it into an article by circling it back into sport in a crammed in way. He knows almost nothing about football and is one of the most tedious columnists out there. His political pieces are similarly dull. Yes, a ping pong player really is allowed to talk about the state of the world in a grown up newspaper. On sport, he usually talks about tennis or some other other sport whilst mentioning his wiff waff trophies. In that Howe article, I got furious with his lack of prior research. I've edited this post, because who cares about the journalist. Point is, Howe has us set up pretty perfectly today and it should be about him instead.

Think they started targeting Livramento and then rapidly gave up on that idea