benjii

Do they actually only have 12 first team players? If so..... lolz.

Looks like the forwards and midfielders are playing well and with confidence but, as others have said, defence and GK is still a concern, plus the drop off to mid-table Champ is quite high so can't read too much into this. We've got tricky fixtures at the start of the season and we still definitely need to add strength at the back.

For the third goal, I wonder if Adams' sleeve would have been offside if that was a Prem match with VAR? Seriously! He needs to stop pointing in front, if they are going to carry on with their retarded use of VAR. Let's hope that the officials learnt something from the Euros.

I would probably watch less women's gymnastics if they wore more clothes, but I can totally understand why they prefer not to parade their gusset. Re Gao: I am not saying he should have a master plan and should be actively engaged in day to day affairs, or that we should have some kind of unique selling point. I just take issue with the idea that "self sustaining" is a strategy because running at 80% wages to turnover and borrowing 80m quid is not sustainable so, even if it is a strategy ' it's not going to lead anywhere in the long run. And that's fine, I guess. Lots of clubs come and go, and we go through ups and downs. Personally, though, if I was going to acquire a business, I would make sure I could actually bring something useful to the table. I guess I see it as a question of integrity, largely. He saw Saints as a convenient place to dump some cash outside China. That's all we are to him. And I don't respect that.

But "self sufficient" isn't a strategy, it's simply a statement that there won't be any external investment. In the absence of external investment, you spend less than you generate, or you go bust. That's hardly a clever strategy. The strategy would be mapping out how to be self sufficient and competitive because, on that front, we are failing and will likely continue to do so. We don't do anything particularly special, we don't have any sort of "USP" and most other Prem clubs are well established and have comparable facilities and more money. So, if you want to be charitable and call "self-sufficiency" a "strategy" (which it obviously isnt), it's not a very good one. Gao's investment in SFC has been a disaster for him personally and is potentially a disaster for the club. He has no plan, no vision, no clue and has brought nothing. Gao has issued one public statement in his several years in charge, which was about fives lines long, and given a couple of snippets to one or two journalists. Let's not pretend there is a strategy, because there clearly isn't. As I've said several times on here, it's good that he isn't a mentalist doing weird things. But, similarly, he doesn't bring anything positive whatsoever. He has taken over ownership and shown himself incapable of adding any value. That's the fact. Why shouldn't fans want an owner who has something to add? The sad reality is, though, that Premier League football is fucked. It is unsustainable unless you have an ultra-rich owner or are Man U or Liverpool, with a big enough brand.

Two lesbians. Sisters, probably.

Nice to see the taking a knee will be carried on this season.

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. - Jonathan Swift

Image rights payments are made but they're not the bulk of the salary for the vast majority of players - HMRC clamped down on this. Paul Pogba, Harry Kane, de Bruyne etc. sure, they earn loads of image rights and those will be paid as royalties to a service company, not as PAYE. Jack Stephens, Alex McCarthy, Nathan Redmond.... they aren't earning the bulk of their salary as image rights, however.

What's your source for this? Sounds like an urban myth. How would the net figure be known with any certainty? And you can work out average salary from club accounts reporting on salary mass, and it's not 40%+ higher than it should be (which it would be if all football wages noted were net of tax). And what if the tax rate changes? The club has to gross up the salary to deliver the quoted net figure? Nah, that's bull. So I reckon you're wrong, mush.

You often see these statements on here but it's complete bullshit. Loads of people perform badly in jobs for decades without being sacked. It's very rare for someone to be managed out for bad performance "in the real world". Anyway, this thread has been quite entertaining latterly, thanks mostly to your posts and this sort of 1960s pub-bore character you're running, so cheers for that.

If they can pull this off, why can't anyone sell a home printer that fucking works properly?

My point was precisely that we did have one player - Vest - that we over relied on and that others need to do more, in particular our midfielders. Not that we get one midfielder in to do all our passing. So I think you actually agree with me.

I know what you're saying but, perversely, Vestergaard's ability on the ball meant we were over reliant on him IMO. Initiating moves should be what the central midfielders do. The best team on the ball, by far, in the Euros was Spain. Their centre backs play simple balls to Busquets and he knits play together. You don't need your centre backs to be taking people on and threading balls through the eye of a needle, you just need them to have a decent first touch and find a simple pass to someone better than them. That's where you need someone like JWP to step up and show some responsibility for creating things, rather than just playing the first 10 yard easy pass that he sees (usually back to the centre back). Romeu can knit things together but our other midfielders will need to do more. Being reliant on a centre back to be your play maker makes you easy to defend against, as our abysmal second half season form showed. So, Vest out, this lad in cheaply and spend the money on someone willing to put their foot on the ball in midfield is a good strategy for me.

I've been working on a reasonably chunky commercial arrangement with a very high profile English football club over the last couple of months and they've been a pain in the arse to deal with. Stupid, unrealistic contractual positions, and constantly changing their position on key commercial terms, as well as being quite slow. That's without having to deal with some greedy, dodgy player agents as well. So it's made me appreciate what a pain it must be trying to sort certain transfers out.

LOL! You think Hitler was real?! Use your loaf FFS!!!

It's not helpful to speculate. Please remember that everyone is entitled to be presumed innocent until proven Gylti.

Sounds as though CollinsDic will have to pack away the glow-sticks and ease of the eccies, come September.

Your boss sounds like a fucking moron. Sorry to hear about the beatings.

Can't blame him. I'm sure we've all wanted to get into Young Boys at some point.

Anecdotal but... .... one of the reasons why saying restrictions should be removed because ICU cases are not high misses the bigger picture.

Then we'll have no chance of doing anything, unless we get another set of easy fixtures. Not saying JWP is the answer but with the same central midfield we will get schooled by anyone decent. You can't have two cloggers in there and just hope Sterling, Kane or a full back pulls something out of the bag. Admittedly, if you rarely concede that can get you fairly far but if you want to excel you need people who can build play properly. It's not a criticism of anyone in particular, just that if we don't find a better class of ball player in central mid then we have no chance. Spain absolutely murdered Italy in midfield and would have killed us. I also doubt we would get anything against Belgium or France. So we're something like the 5th best team in Europe. If we had Spain's midfield or Italy's midfield, we'd be the best. Sadly, we don't.

Carry on having zero quality on the ball in midfield but getting piss easy draws? Need to build a team with more ability and less reliance on pace. Although we're on on right track.

Yep, we've barely touched the ball since the 20th minute. Too plodding in midfield and no one taking control of the play. That's the problem with two tacklers in there. Think we'll lose comfortably now. Southgate needs to do something. Get Bellingham or Grealish on, be braver on the ball, and push the defence up on Chiesa.

This BBC build up is fucking class. Come on England!