Sunbury Fox

How come Green only bowled 5 overs when he was the most economical bowler? Appreciate that he bowled in the middle of the innings, when they were consolidating, but could he have been given a couple more overs?

Would expect Hants to get 300 from here, with only 3 wickets down. Will be a challenging chase, given they have some high quality bowlers.

The situation is much worse than I thought it would be. I knew Cooper was a massive downgrade on Enzo, and that we would have to sell KDH. But I thought we'd at least sign a few decent players to give ourselves some hope. As it is, however, getting promotion has been pointless. We are totally unprepared and I have no enthusiasm for the season at all. In fact, even though it's the first home game after promotion, I've sold mine and my boys' season tickets for Monday through the resale platform. Just can't face the long drive home and getting home after midnight after seeing us get thumped. My worry is that it's going to get even worse before it gets better.

Not sure about that - by the 80th minute the ground will be empty apart from the Spurs' fans and our singing corner.

Let's agree to disagree on that. I'm sure the majority on here would agree with me that relying on a selection from a 38 year old, a striker who hardly lit up the Championship and failed last time in the PL, and a totally unproven striker who played only rarely last season in the Champo meant that a new striker was a priority, along with creative midfielders, for this season.

So our need for a PL level striker wasn't known in May?

Depressing that Leeds are getting as much for bloody Rutter as we got for Maddison and more than we got for Barnes, even though he has done nothing at PL level and scored only 6 (SIX!!) goals in the Champo last season.

Yep, despite weeks of trying on our part - and yet they've got this sorted in a matter of days after Solanke left.

Surprised it's not 6 out of 6.

Imagine going from bringing in a couple of players per week each summer at F*rest to this?!!

Seems very odd for personal terms to be the cause for the deal getting delayed. You'd think he was being offered more money by us.

Hull is playing for the Lions so won't be available. Not sure about the others. Wondering if we might have been better finishing 3rd, rather than 2nd in the group? That would have given us Worcs and Glamorgan as the route to the final, as opposed to Hants and Somerset.

These always looked like tricky batting conditions. Really up against it now.

Off to a flyer!

Hopefully Spurs will ease off once they're 2 or 3 up.

Chances are that we'll sign none of those so this is an academic question.

In parallel with selling our best player, we've not yet made 1 signing that will improve our Championship starting XI from last season, bearing in mind Fatawu was already here. How on earth can we hope for anything other than ritual humiliation on a weekly basis in the coming season?

Fair play to Palace if they can get that kind of money for such trash. Compare that to our failure to get a single penny for any of Cags, Youri and Nacho, all of whom are far superior players to Ayew.

This must be a wind-up!

I would rather have kept Albrighton than buy Ayew. He offers nothing and we'll be saddled with him on big money for 3 years.

You're bigging up Ayew after slagging off Zaha for days?!!

This is horrendous news. Really getting to the point where I can't be bothered with the club any more. If he gets 2 goals and 2 assists it will be one of his best seasons for years. To be honest, getting promoted was a waste of time, by the look of it - plus, when we get relegated we are going to be stuck with a load of ageing, past it players on big money seeing out time on their contracts.

Zaha was instrumental in carrying a bottom-half team to safety for season after season. Lingard was playing for one of the best teams in the league and did little of note for them.

Yeah but per 90 stats can be misleading as Zaha has got those numbers over a sustained period, unlike Lingard, who really only had 1 purple patch over half v a season at West Ham and did little else of note.

I get the potential concern but Zaha has a much better PL track record than Lingard.