Matt1892

He is letting the club know that if Paul Mitchell is allowed to force foreign footballers on him then he is off. Seems like the battle lines have been drawn already. Worrying.

Dominic Calvert-Lewin Anthony Elanga Trevor Chalobah

It must be tempting looking at the players England have available, knowing he could potentially be the person to win them a trophy for the first time in 60 years.

It benefits selling clubs and agents to leak information in the hope of getting in to a bidding war, for both fee and wages.

You only have to watch him to see how much better he is down the left than the right, he didn’t have a particularly good season for Leeds in the Championship compared to Summerville and Rutter, so we would be buying potential. He would make sense if we were selling both Almiron and Murphy but I wouldn’t have much faith in him as first choice RW or as Wilson’s replacement.

Gnonto is primarily left winger, he only plays on the right as Summerville is a better player than him down the left. Would be worth a gamble if we could pick him up cheap but if he is our main signing at RW then that is about as underwhelming as you can get.

We either need to sell Longstaff or give him a new contract, I think we might go for the latter and then look to sell him next summer, so we can spread our sales out to benefit FFP if Trippier, Almiron and Wilson are being moved on.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we signed Trafford and loaned out Vlachodimos.

Onana isn’t as imposing as he should be but he still has a lot of potential, Villa have a good midfield for him to develop in.

Chelsea are being investigated over historic breaches still, so you would home the league would hit them hard over that to make up for them blatantly taking the piss with their latest stunts. I wish we would do the same.

Dangerous play.

I think it’s fair to say that we were a lot more desperate back then than we are now, he was bought to do a short term job and was moved on quite quickly afterwards.

Settle down with the laughing emojis, Comrade.

The season we came top 4 he made 3 league starts before being pushed out of the door in the January window, playing 440 minutes of football.

I think that improvement was more around Howe coming in than Chris Wood, who was moved on quite quickly as there was such a drop in our play when we did rely on him.

But was our top 4 form because of Chris Wood or in spite of having Chris Wood?

The tactics remained the same, as they did the season before. The issue last season was Wilson wasn’t fit enough to get any sort of run of games or form under his belt. I don’t see Calvert-Lewin being able to slot in with the kind of football we currently play, he’s not a good finisher with the ball at his feet and there will be a reliance on getting to the touch line and crossing from the wide players rather than cutting in as they do now.

Isn’t that why we have brought Paul Mitchell in? As part of the excitement in him getting the role is the amount of players he has brought in to clubs from abroad that have been successful. So I don’t see why we are so limited on option that we have to see that anything better than Calvert-Lewin is unachievable. Whilst you can’t guarantee success with a replacement for Wilson that also goes for DCL, who you would think would have the attributes to star in a team playing the kind of football that Dyche does. The other issue is that Wilson can slot in to the team when Isak is out and we can still play the same type of football, yet we can’t do this with DCL as his attributes are completely different, meaning we will have to change the way we play to accommodate him, which is fine in the last 20 minutes of a game when chasing against a team sat deep but you wouldn’t want to have to play like that for a number of weeks or months.

Calvert-Lewin is going to cost a fortune in wages.

Based on ability, would I be comfortable with Calvert-Lewin being our main forward if Isak was in it for a period of time through injury? Absolutely not.

I didn’t say we got him at a discount, more that we went in with a low bid that was reportedly half of what we ended up paying. I don’t recall anyone saying we were behaving like Mike Ashley at the time, more we were being opportunistic, which is what Man Utd are doing with the low bid to turn the players head.

There is a difference between the starting point of Man Utd and Mike Ashley though, one is the biggest spenders in Europe over the last decade and the other had the no ambition whatsoever. How much was our first bid for Livramento reported to be? Less than half what we paid wasn’t it?

It isn’t irrelevant, you put an offer up to the point that you are prepared to pay, if Everton refuse to accept that then you walk away. What they are doing with the bidding is turning the players head, which applies pressure behind the scenes. Not many clubs just walk away once quoted an inflated fee, especially if they have had the nod from the player.

That is a good offer for Branthwaite, he isn’t a £60 million footballer and it is debatable if he has to potential to become one either.

Madueke has the potential to go up a few levels if he can get a consistent run in a team.