JimJams

I don't think we'll get him for free mate.

You most certainly did not!

I think the obvious solution, which is likely what's going to happen, is you loan him to the championship. However you want to loan him to a team that's looking good for promotion and equally will get decent minutes. If he is awesome but we don't need him, we can likely sell at a profit, especially if the club he is at gets promoted. If he's awesome and we do need him, either in January or for next season, bring him back. He'll either be champ proven and we'll be in the champ with a striker we can hang our hat on or he'll be champ proven and we'll have kept our Prem status and he'll be ready to make the step up as our 2nd, 3rd choice probably. If he's respectable without being remarkable, then we can probably get our money back on him anyway. If he's dogshit then you could probably still get half what we paid. And at worst we've got a player nobody wants. So in terms of risk/reward if we don't look at the extremes either end best case is we double our money after a team gets a good return from him and they or a promoted side buy him, or he goes for half that because he's underwhelmed but £3-4mill is pish money for strikers even at champ level. *If the need for funds is that desperate for this season, we at least should be getting our money back. He was £7mill ish.

I don't care anytime really if we're talking about the sorts of figures we got for Fofana. As a club we will always be tasked with replacing our brightest players, as are the likes of Brighton. Sometimes you'll come unstuck but if you're making bank when it happens then it's a good problem to have. A far better problem than having good players who run down their contracts. You just can't get attached.

Exactly. I wouldn't really give a shit tbh. We need someone now for the team. If that player is pushing for a move to a big 6er in a year or two that has to be a good thing. The alternative is don't get him because of a perceived fear that he is good and wants to leave? That or sign shit nobody will want.

Why? Guy has less goal contributions than the likes of DCR and Ayew in inferior leagues. I know he's young but what makes him an interesting acquisition?

And yet Bergwijn only scored 8 goals (9assts) in 83 appearances for Spurs. A better team than Palace. Near identical stats really. Around a goal and an assist every 10 games. If Ayew is shit from a statistical standpoint, so is Bergwijn. But he'll cost about 3-4x as much. Maybe more.

Everton.

Cooper is setting us up not to lose rather than to win. Which is fine, but it's uninspiring. And the trouble you have when you do that is that when you choose to play dull, insipid, "pragmatic" football, then you sure as shit need to make sure you're getting results. Or you're going to get a lot of shit from dissatisfied fans. And you deserve to to be fair. We've lost goals and threat with the sale of KDH, so to choose to leave out one of our few decent attacking players in Mavididi is suicidal for me. You're leaving one of last seasons biggest threats out so that you have a decent option to turn to on the bench later in the game. Trouble is the game may well be over by then, and that's probably in part because you've crippled our attacking threat up to that point. I've said before that he seems to be making his job harder than it should be. He's come into a successful team with good players playing a system that got the best out of the majority of players. Yet he seems to be operating as though he's come in for a sacked manager at a team that's struggled and needs a complete overhaul. Every manager has their own ideas but I don't get discarding things you could see clearly worked. Ricardo and Mav being the two major ones. Ricardo is our best fullback, no matter which way you play him. So why not play him? He can invert, he can play high, overlap, pass, cross, dribble, whatever you want, and he does it better than the others. His only issue is can he retain fitness if you use him as a traditional fullback. But even if the answer is no, then play him until you can't, then put JJ there. It makes no sense to do it the other way around. "We've got this really good player but we're worried he might get injured, so to avoid that we're just going to cast him into the abyss and not play him at all. Can't get injured then!". The Mav situation is just mental. The Ricardo situation is odd. And it's difficult to know if it's because Cooper doesn't rate them as much as anybody with eyes, or there's something else in it. Maybe tactical, maybe there's something sinister in it (player sale?), but as of now it's bollocks to be honest. We need our best players on the pitch wherever possible. Choosing not to do that is lunacy. On the face of things, Villa isn't a game I'd expect anything from. But after that we have Palace and Everton. Palace are selling everyone and have no points, Everton are shit. He needs to have gotten 4 points from those 3 games to get people on side somewhat. Certainly at home to Everton. We'll be 5 games in then plus the Tranmere game to see if tactically he's showing something rather than just throwing players on the pitch. He made half time changes against Spurs which worked well and the game only started going away from us again after the momentum was halted by the injury stoppage, but against Fulham it was kind of the same from start to finish. The Mav experiment hasn't shown any positive results, so hopefully he packs that in right away. /rant

Whilst you might be right, he does see the players in training everyday and he's not given Riccy a minute. So...

Fulham did.

That's just cos BDR is keeping that side covered, defending from the front.

Shows how fxxked the psr fiddle is.

As a priority, no. As an upgrade, ok.

What striker worth £45mill is coming to us then?

That is horrendous scraping of the barrel. Hope they don't get him cos there's a danger Everton then go and get someone good.

Swap for Bouba. We don't need another cb but we also don't need boob.

Stupid sell on fee, stupid addon for survival, that's loads of fantasy money that may never need paying. Do it. Can he play as a high 8 though? And I don't mean off his tit's....

The only other thing it could be in a minor conspiracy theorist way is that Cooper does rate Ricardo, but not sure on JJ and he's thrown him in to see if we need the likes of Bright to replace JJ on the right. And it seems we might. Or he sees Ricardo as a DM not a fullback.

Makes total sense. Cooper said we don't need to worry about rightback. We've got one of our best players for the position. And both have Premier league experience. So naturally we need another.

So not Steve Bergwijn then.

It seems like the club are signing players with the expectation that we're selling someone, but that sale doesn't materialise. Last summer there were rumours of Daka to Bournemouth. Maybe Cannon was signed to replace him. Like Okoli this summer. There were rumours of Faes, and although Vesty signed before Okoli, perhaps the deal was started because we were unsure if the big Dane was staying. Trouble is the players they'd replace never left. So we have both, and the unproven one is sat out.

I don't think checking other relegation favourites results is a big deal given we're probably going to need at least 6 points on all of them. Monday being fine isn't relevant.

I was there after 1.

The positive for us is that Everton, Saints and Ipswich all lost.