indierich06

Balague is an arsehole, but it's in a revealing piece. Essentially trying to use interest elsewhere as leverage to get what he wants here - all I'll say is no one man is bigger than this club, and if he's not happy with transfer funds or the wage bill, then he's free to pursue his options in my opinion. He shouldn't overplay his hand - I can't believe anyone who watched us during that run-in is beating a path to his door, let alone 'top' Italian and Spanish clubs.

At £15m that's a no brainer.

https://www.footballinsider247.com/arsenal-will-accept-offers-for-trio-to-fund-bruno-guimaraes-move-sources/ Nketiah, Nelson and Smith-Rowe? I'd take all three to be honest.

We're so obviously going to need to cut our cloth this season, I really hope we go back to trying to find rough diamonds in smaller leagues - it worked well last season with the likes of Hermansen, Fatawu etc. Let's build a young, hungry squad and forget trying any 'marquee' signings. Wage structure needs a total reset too.

My post was a bit tongue in cheek, but I genuinely feel like we're in a lose-lose situation. If we don't reinforce the squad, we're almost certainly going down with the points deduction we're likely to receive, which will put the club at risk financially. But if we do reinforce to the level we probably need, then we likely get punished again and the cycle continues. In the meantime, these arbitrary deadlines mean that bigger clubs can force you to accept low-ball bids for your best talent in order to meet your financial targets - no more holding out for big money like we did with Fofana, Maguire, Mahrez etc when clubs know you need the money in this year's accounts - if Dewsbury-Hall is going to go, he will need to go by the end of June, so that's not exactly going to allow us to play hardball, or encourage any clubs to spend big. And then the clubs that can afford to throw money around are skewing the market by paying exorbitant transfer fees for average players, with the trickle down effect being that everyone has to end up paying bigger fees overall. How do we a) abide by the rules and b) hold onto to decent players and generally be competitive? Because those are two goals that, for a growing number of clubs, are not compatible with eachother. Most clubs don't have a setup like Brighton and aren't able to uncover the same kind of prospects - we certainly don't any more when you look at our average recruitment over the last few seasons. It seemingly only takes a bad window, or sacking a manager to put you at risk of falling foul of PSR, so more and more clubs are going to fall foul of this. FFP has always been a joke, but these new rules are genuinely broken to the point that they're going to lock smaller teams into a cycle of either 'overspending' (based on the arbitrary rules) or just existing to be asset stripped while the likes of Man City, Liverpool, Arsenal et al batter them every week on their inevitable march towards the title every single season - if it wasn't football we'd be calling it a monopoly, and talking about the absolutely flagrant disregard of basic competition law.

Sounds like we can either spend and get a points deduction or not spend and get a points deduction, so we may as well fly in the face of these ridiculous rules and just do what we want. Every team outside the top 6 will be getting a points deduction every season if this nonsense carries on.

If he's happy to drop his salary significantly then I say keep him on - I adore the bloke, but there's no way he should be on anything approaching 6 figures a week if we get promoted, especially considering how much cost cutting we're going to have to do, and how many players we're going to need to buy.

This is brilliant, thanks!

My brain isn't working this morning. What do we need to guarantee promotion? By my maths, if we beat Southampton and Preston, Leeds can't catch us regardless of whether they win the rest of their games.

I do think Enzo will (or should have) learned a lot in his first season as a manager, and that will stand him in good stead. But one thing that does worry me is that he never seems that introspective after a match - it's always 'the system is fine, we created enough chances to win, we played well'... but how do we account for the losses and the poor form then? If it's just him backing his players publicly, that's fine - but if he really doesn't think there's anything to improve on, or any ways that HE can improve, or any ways his system can be tweaked to counteract the ways it's been exploited this season, then that's a problem. The style can be a bit dry at times, but that seems like the way football is going more generally at the minute, thanks to Guardiola. I do feel for Enzo in the sense that - by and large - we DO create enough chances to win most games we play, we just don't seem to have the strikers to finish them. Vardy is quite a way past his best, I had high hopes for Iheanacho and Daka in this league, but they've proved they're not up to it and should be moved on IMO. But then it's baffling that Cannon hasn't been given more of a chance, given the performances he put in when he did play. And it begs the question - why didn't we move for a more suitable striker in the summer? We let Leeds strengthen by buying Piroe, while leaving ourselves with strikers who weren't good enough. Piroe's not had an amazing season at Leeds, but you look at a lot of the chances we create and we're crying out for a strong, mobile, skilful finisher, and I don't think Leeds have utilised him well. Maybe we were gambling on the fact that the existing strikers could do the business? But I think a smarter move would have been to sell one or two (Iheanacho and Daka) to get them off the wage bill and fund a replacement. All in all, you can't argue the season hasn't been a success if we go up automatically, as champions or runners up, and Enzo should be given the summer to evolve the team - we're likely losing Ndidi, Iheanacho, Praet, Vestergaard, Vardy, Albrighton, the futures of Yunus, Fatawu and Doyle are all up in the air currently too, and clubs are once again going to be sniffing around at the likes of Dewsbury-Hall. That's about six regular starters and 10 squad players whose futures are uncertain. And all this set to the backdrop of ongoing financial issues and a likely points deduction. We'll likely be odds on to go down next season, especially if we start on -6 or whatever the PL decides - I hope we go back to looking at young players with potential (<£10m), and shrewd experienced players, rather than just throwing money around in a desperate attempt to stay up like Forest have done recently. Build a side for the future, regardless of next season's outcome - the mentality at this club is rotten to the core, it looked like we'd fixed it early in the season, but the fight appears to have gone yet again now we're in the thick of it. TL;DR - Enzo's got his flaws, hopefully he learns from them, if he gets us up he deserves a shot at keeping us there.

Tbf, I can't imagine anything worse than sitting in the home end at Leeds while they're winning. Dreadful fanbase.

I think he's doing the best he can with a bunch of freaks who don't actually care/have enough footballing ability. I don't think there's any scenario where someone like Farke or McKenna would have walked the league with these players. About two-thirds of them aren't good enough, don't care or don't want to be here - it's not enough.

This is my worry - I don't think we have the money (or frankly the nous in the market) to get him the players we need if we get promoted. Having said that, I also don't think any other manager would get much of a tune out of this band of rejects and wasters tbh. Every year the better players go, and the squad gets worse. They looked half decent at the start of the season, but all the same old problems have emerged - with the root cause being that these players just aren't very good.

Hmm yeah it's not too bad. it was less than 1 against Millwall IIRC, which was my main concern. I guess those two games combined show that we're either not creating good enough chances at the minute, or when we do we're not putting them away - two big problems.

We certainly have struggled against a low block in the last few games, I'm not sure what it is - the chances we're creating aren't great, the xG shows that. We don't seem to be moving our opponents out of position with our passing anymore either - whether that's our players' failings, or teams getting wise to it, I'm not sure. Whereas the one decent performance in recent weeks - vs Norwich - was a game that was a lot more open IIRC.

Just blood Alves and Braybrooke next season, if we go up we'll be odds on to go back down again, may as well get them in.

Yeah dunno what the **** I was on about there tbh 😂

Man - there's Ewing, Briggs, Alves, Braybrooke, Cover... Ben Nelson's not even really broken through yet either. Future looks super bright, and financial restrictions might mean that these lads actually get their chance.

It's still insane that, despite the recent performances and results, if we win the next two games we'll be 2pts clear at the top by end of play Tuesday. Only way we're going to go up automatically is if we go for 12 points - no more pissing about now.

Hoping that the upcoming games against West Brom and Southampton will be much more open - I still think Maresca is too inflexible and needs to be a bit more pragmatic, but I think open games suit us better. It's no surprise that we look better when teams aren't putting 10 men behind the ball and hitting us on the break because we're overcommitted. That's basically the template to beat us - let us have the ball, pack the box as we don't have creative enough players or clinical enough players to unlock defences full of bodies, then hit us fast on the break - preferably down our right flank when the inverted fullback is in midfield, and you'll probably score because our defenders are a) slow & b) poor.

Come on, this is simply not true. Leeds and Southampton both have comparable, if not better/more well-balanced, squads than us. And you're being extremely disingenuous to other teams in what is a very competitive league, and there are certainly players playing for teams outside of the newly-relegated sides that are better than what we have - Jack Clarke, Gabriel Sara, Jaden Philogene, Morgan Whittaker, Leif Davis... I agree with much of the criticism of Maresca's one-dimensional football, but the table simply does not lie - we are top, with a game in hand, in one of the most competitive championship seasons ever, and could rank among the highest points scorers in the league's history.

No surprise our turd run coincided with his injury, so glad he's back. Shows you how vital that role is too.

Tbf if you'd told me we'd be playing Wilf as an attacking midfielder and Ricardo in the middle before the start of this season, I'd have thought you were nuts.

Choudhury must not play. No surprise that we've been ****ing turd since Ricardo's been out.