Finnegan

gtfo

You guys think there's a plan

I suppose that depends where you see Page's best position but yeah, sure, ultimately. I imagine the team in the coming weeks will most commonly be something like: Stol, Ricardo, Lascelles, Nelson, Thomas Skipp, Aribo, Fatawu, BDCR/Mukasa, Mavididi, Ayew For the record, that's not necessarily what I'd pick. Just what I think is likely.

It also doesn't help that the BBC have posted it as one of their top football stories as if it's actually news. "Dwight McNeil's missus says something on social media" isn't news.

Joe Aribo just asked Southampton to recall him.

My problem with O'Rourke and Nixon is that they conduct their business by bulk volume. It's the proverbial throw-enough-mud, etc. Clearly they're professional journalists and there's obviously agents out there that do speak to them. But they also make their money off mass-posting engagement bait and so 99.9% of what they say is going to be complete and total drivel. The people that are considered higher tier sources, guys like Collomosse, Percy, even Tanner, they don't post rumours for the sakes of it or to make their income from getting clicks. They post rumours when they're actually confident they're genuinely happening and they care about their reputation. Even if that means you hear from them significantly less often, you can be sure they're accurate. Collomosse, Tanner and even Dorsett were fairly obviously all looped in by the club last night and told to report that we were confident we'd gotten Lascelles and Mukasa done and the delay was with the EFL. Lo' and behold, this morning, that's the case.

I think he'll play 10, he's our Ramsey replacement. I'd bet a decent amount of money that when the dust settles in a few weeks time, Mukasa will be rotating at 10 with BDCR, Richards will be warming the bench because he isn't anywhere near ready for the Championship and we've flopped again trying to find a striker and Jordan Ayew will still be starting at 9.

He will. Hard to say until you see him step in to the side and actually play some senior football but I sat and watched a fair few highlights of their games yesterday and, being entirely honest, he does look more developed than Page. He runs everything for their youth team, he's excellent on the ball and looks pretty comfortable at both 10 and 9 although I doubt we'll play him as a striker.

N'golo Kante is 3'5 and about 4 stone wet through. Contrary to Ruud's perception, you don't need to look like a rugby league prop to play as a defensive midfielder. I don't think Skipp is overly lightweight, to be honest, he's not Bayo Akinfenwa but he puts himself about a bit, he holds reads the game fairly well and has cut a few balls out. He's obviously not a brilliant player and I'd love it if we upgraded him but he's perfectly good enough to play as a DM in the Championship.

You're a stranger on the internet and I've got no idea who you are. I don't know why you seem offended by me not believing you, pal. Would you believe you?

It'll be structured in a way, you imagine, that's essentially no different to a loan just without actually being a loan because we've got a cap of 5 in a match day squad. I doubt he's taking any pay cut, between ourselves and Newcastle we've no doubt negotiated something that sees him retain the same income but now he gets to play some first team football and get his fitness back. Plus, he doesn't have to commit to us if we get relegated and he was going to be out of contract anyway. Win win.

I mean if my football club wanted to spend £5m on Dwight McNeil I'd be livid.

Is he ****. Rudkin doesn't even know where Budapest is, he thinks it's the capital of Romania. There's no way Keane has been mentioned anywhere other than Foxestalk.

Skipp is the defensive midfielder. He was an absolute ****ing disaster as an 8, he's slowly started to pick up some credibility and put some decent performances in because Cifuentes finally clocked this and had him sit back and just stay and anchor the team. If you were playing twin 8s with our current squad you'd have James and then either BDCR or Page. And lets be clear about this, no 11 we put out from our squad should be anything like a relegation risk. Even if the muck people hate are good enough to have us be pushing top half if the actual morale of the squad was alright, if we were being coached sufficiently, if the tactical approach was half decent.

Eh, it's just example #568363 why footballers and especially their families shouldn't be posting their drama all over social media. I mean, for clarity, nobody should but I do agree that it's a read-the-room kinda moment when you're complaining about not getting to move to London to earn millions when you already live in Liverpool earning millions. Especially given that anyone with even the slightest bit of knowledge of football can look at Crystal Palace's day yesterday and realise they, too, were having a pretty bad day and it's fairly obvious why other deals collapsed.

Fill in the gaps.

Desperately needed a striker. Desperately needed attacking players and defenders. Got one of the worst box to box midfielders in the league who doesn't even get in to our best 11 currently, with all the injuries. Amazing.

This is a new low for foxestalk. I feel physically angry.

In a completely different league, one that's gone substantially downhill, playing for a completely different side. We've just signed a cast off from a team in our own division that we've seen play many times at this level and isn't very good. Cmon man. Stop defending this. I'm not expecting anyone to start piling on and giving him personal abuse or anything, not his fault. But this is another abysmal bit of business from our club and we've every right to be annoyed at our complete disintegration in the transfer market.

The scenes when it turns out Aribo is the only one we got done

Just a certain amount of sense I think. I know it's extremely tempting to assume we're the biggest idiots in the world, we certainly don't manage the wage bill very well. But we're obviously being very, very cautious with the purse strings at the moment which is why we're loaning Aribo in the first place. I just can't see us doing it if it was costing that much.

Narh I'm sorry there's 0% chance we're paying all of his wage. We're stuck with Joe Aribo BECAUSE he's about the cheapest we could probably manage to bring in. Southampton are desperate to get rid of some of his wages off their bill, I know we love to clown on Rudkin and rightly so but I'll be ****ing amazed if he's costing us 70k a week.

We're very obviously not paying all of that