southernmag

Maybe he's a bit of a maverick that Eddie can wrangle into something.

This'll test the 'Eddie can do no wrong' brigade by the sounds...

I don't rate Ramsdale as low as some, but surely someone like Chevalier or Lammens would be better value? Slightly points to the unimaginative/risk averse targeting some suspect is going on.

I hope to goodness we're not after Jackson. That'd reek of unimaginative target identification, at best. Also don't think he has the temperament or ability to be our lead striker. Thankfully I'd be surprised if we were after him. Sesko and Wissa would be two good signings in my view, but the odds of getting even one of them I'd put at 50%.

Interesting to observe the hate for Mitchell. Seems very possible that what happened was, he came in, saw we needed to adjust our transfer strategy (ie not doggedly go for established/cartel targets only), Eddie wouldn't accept that, so one of them had to go. For all Eddie's good qualities, you could argue that Mitchell's the one who's been largely vindicated this summer. He's an easy scapegoat sure, but I think the inconvenient truth is that our transfer incompetence is down to more than just one person, who was only here 12 months. If you lose the ability to be sharp and decisive in the transfer market because a single staff member left, albeit your DOF, you've got deeper issues than you're willing to acknowledge.

Wissa OR DCL, surely. If we got both as our Isak/Wilson replacement I think people would riot.

Blast. Clubs stealing our targets, yet again... how are we supposed to get a deal done in 7 weeks?

At the off chance we sign the players we need, it'll likely be very late in the window that we get the deals done. Makes a mockery of what Eddie said before the summer about getting deals done early, but at this point I'll take anything. We just need the players.

But also, in defense of some of these players choosing big clubs over us, they understandably would want to see that we can offer them things that compensate for our lack of spending power/trophy winning (cup win notwithstanding) - they want to see ambition, a well run club, great transfers being made. They can see our club's in a suboptimal state at the moment, which will make us less appealing. That's something we can't blame on these players - our club has to take responsibility for that, and present itself as a club that means serious business in the areas that matter. TLDR; if Sesko goes to Man Utd I won't entirely think he's an idiot, just mostly.

Footballers are dumb, and greedy, and PSR's a crock, and so on. That's exactly why we have to be super smart and super efficient in how we operate. If we're not, these challenging realities will continually thwart us. It seems we need to target the 10% of players not readily romanced by the clout of the cartel. Is Sesko one of those players? Guess we'll find that out.

I don't find those words very encouraging. He sounds pretty downbeat. "We know what we wanted."

It'd be nice to win the lottery. Not gonna happen though.

So we need a CB or two but couldn't get Guehi last summer. Thus, there's nothing else we can do. If only there were other players out there.

Something like that. There was a fake blood incident in a Harlequins game once (might be what you're referring to), utterly bizarre.

That's it. Glass half full approach.

Merciless sarcasm. I like it.

Man, as someone brought up following rugby, the whole thing of rolling around screaming like you've had a limb torn off only to run it off 20 seconds later... is utterly revolting. Will never be ok with it. Embarrassing that football never addresses it.

Headband.

Alex Murphy always has quite an anxious look on his face. Hope it's not reflective of his actual confidence levels.

Teams like Arsenal aren't particularly bright - they actually bring the best out of us with their moaning and histrionics. We feed on that stuff.

Eddie needs to have a word in his ear. "Just don't try it mate. Send it into row Z."

Yeap. I think the majority of us would agree we've been narrow minded and naive in our approach to transfers. That's why we are where we are today. I actually don't mind the club making mistakes - we're all human at the end of the day and can only do our best. But this is at least two summers in a row now. It's getting embarrassing. At some point we must change how we do things.

I understand Wissa's position - this may be his one and only chance to move to a CL club, and on notably higher wages. To be fair to Brentford though, they could probably say, "our promise last year to let you go for 26m was assuming a lack of extenuating circumstances at that time, eg already losing the manager and Mbuemo". That being said, quoting anything near 50m seems pretty daft. That's Brentford pretty much trying to price Wissa out of the move. Edit: CL club not PL club...

Have a feeling we're gonna be torn a new one here. At least we have all our new faces to finally see in action.

Yeah I agree. It seems that we're locked into this 'elite/first 11 improvements only' approach, for whatever reason. If that really isn't working, you need to have other cards up your sleeve.