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Jordan Ayew bargain of the summer

Ayew and Ndidi the new Bergkamp and Henry

On what basis is he better than Daka, out of interest? His record for goals+assists relative to his minutes played for Burnley and Union is much worse than Daka's for us even if you leave out the latter's Championship stats

I'm not having that we don't have the players to play out. Better opposition yes but Hermansen, Vestergaard and Winks are all very good at receiving and passing the ball under pressure, as is Ricardo if he ever gets let out of Cooper's dungeon. The only one who you would say categorically does not suit it is Wilf but with Skipp coming in for big money maybe that's about to stop being a problem. I have no doubt we would concede goals doing it but we are also going to concede goals if we're constantly launching it to nobody in particular and having it come straight back at us. Speaking of which, if anything I would say we don't have the players to go long because we have very little in the way of physical presence to hold the ball up, and if we're going over the top who is chasing it exactly, 37-year-old Vardy or the lightning pace of Ayew and Reid?

Can we really afford to lose our joint top scorer?

What really concerns me is that irrespective of the increased quality of the opposition, I'm 100% convinced we are a worse team now than we were last year. Part of that is down to our transfer business as we've somehow spent upwards of £50m without really improving the first eleven, but part of it is on Cooper dropping two of our better players from last season and having a plan that doesn't seem to go any further than sitting deep and seeing if we can steal a goal on the break. I think we are probably only a handful of bad results, or maybe one or two proper hammerings, from him just saying **** it and resorting to full on 5 at the back sufferball like he did at Forest.

Mavididi was still on the bench

Who cares about winning when the manager is a good honest bloke and the team has less of the ball than our opponents? We've got our Leicester back

We've appointed the cheap option and then spent tens of millions bringing in bang average cloggers with his precious Premier League experience. What's the point? Like Rodgers in 22/23, he might not have been dealt the ideal hand but that's no excuse to play it poorly. It is so jarring going from last season, having a team who visibly knew and bought into exactly what their manager wanted them to do, to this. Everything on and off the pitch feels so aimless.

Not necessarily. If he contributes very little e.g. he gets a bad injury or is just totally shit (which I don't think he will be but it's not impossible) and yet we stay up regardless, it will still be a bad use of £8m

If you don't know how to pronounce someone's name correctly then that's fair enough, nobody is familiar with every language and their respective quirks. If you learn/are told how it's meant to be said and still deliberately get it wrong then that is pretty ****ing stupid

I had one read out once and have been advised by my legal team to neither confirm nor deny whether I was wanking during the recording process. I say had one read out, I mean played out.

I wish you would try to engage with some of the points people are presenting you with rather than calling them names and throwing a tantrum

I thought it would be a decent signing if it was for a reasonable fee, it meant Cannon going on loan and it was in addition to, not instead of, a goalscorer and creative player. £8m would put paid to that first one straight away.

It's not glamourous and I hope we have a goalscorer and creator lined up too but I have no doubt at all Ayew in and Cannon out leaves us better equipped

One that sticks in my mind is Albrighton putting an absolute peach in for Slimani at home to West Ham in 16/17. We had someone who was very good at crossing and someone who was very good at heading, and yet that was one of the rare occasions we managed to get them combining to any meaningful effect.

Big Chris Wood with a late equaliser

Lots of headers, blocked shots in crowded areas and also plenty of occasions when they overplayed or just wasted promising positions. I think they were definitely the better team for most of the game but we still created the two best chances and consequently probably deserved the point.

I'm really not convinced he has the physical attributes Cooper wants from his either his full backs or his midfielders

What do you make of Sarmiento? He seems to have been around for ages and whenever I've seen his little cameos for you he's impressed, but it didn't look like he made any great impact in either loan spell last season (apart from against us, naturally) at a level where I'd have expected him to do well. The feeling from my West Brom-supporting friend was that while he maybe wasn't given as many opportunities as he could have been, he didn't exactly shine when he was given the chance.

Like everyone else, what I've seen is a teenager arrive midway through the season and play about ten games as part of a team drifting inexorably towards relegation, during which he struggled in pretty much the same way as all his teammates. He then went and established himself as first choice in a Champions League qualifier from a league that is admittedly not as strong as this one but is definitely stronger than the one we were playing in last season. You're right that having taken those things into account, my conclusion is not that the guy is clearly not good enough and also - the classic when someone wants to criticise a player's personality despite having no real basis for doing so - "thinks he's better than he is". Do you stand by your theory about Cooper not fancying him now that we've seen him effectively picked over Ricardo?

I can't remember who but someone said on here recently that he has form for basically flat out lying about injuries to keep teams guessing. Suppose it makes a change from when Rodgers would tell us a player was out for a couple of weeks and then it turned out they'd been on a plane that had been shot down and crashed into a volcano

I think I understand - if he's crap you were right because unlike all those clowns you always thought he was crap, if he's good you were still right because it must mean he did what you said he should do to stop being crap. I can see why they call you Clever Fox because you have played this quite brilliantly

£30m+ would be stupid money for Nketiah but Arsenal have form for getting stupid money for academy products who haven't really done much of note for them. Iwobi, Willock, Balogun and Smith Rowe have fetched them £100m profit and of those only Iwobi was anything like a regular first team player at the point they sold him.

I can't say I'm familiar with the character but having looked him up that does seem to be the case yeah, though he looks like he might at least have a bit about him with the mask and cape combo. Johnson reminds me primarily of someone I went to school with, both visually and in terms of being a complete fanny