HitchinFox

That Darren Cann with his mousey voice can **** off too.

FIFA is desperate to keep a home country in.

What. A. Save.

England have taken the sting out the first 12 mins. Great work.

It's the other way around. The academy is doing its job, providing talent. It's the rest of the set up that is failing. If we'd still be a Premier League team - and had it been someone else than the current leadership doing the negotiating - I'm confident that the fee would've been more. Or even better, we might have been able to keep Monga for longer.

Good move for him. In a weird way, letting him go shows a glimpse of ambition on our part, too. I would be worried if he'd be the one modeling the new kit, for example.

Out of all the threads we have going at the moment, the "2026-27 Kit" wasn't on my bingo card to ignite a pub fight.

Rudkin is a classic example of a person with certain skillset and experience doing well in a job – then being promoted to a role which is waaaaay out of his reach, capabilities and abilities. There is, in my view, little doubt that when he was Academy Manager (from 2003 onwards) he did a very good job. He had been with us since the late 1990s and knew the region's youth set-ups and was the "perfect" guy for the job to take the academy to the next level. And he did. Let's not forget that under his stewardship, the academy achieved Category One status and began producing some decent players (Kingy, Schlupp etc.) As academy manager, he basically ran the place and was responsible for the overall academy operation, including staffing, philosophy and long-term strategy, rather than just coaching one age group. This is well documented. He was doing a job that he had developed into and become good at – youth football. The massive mistake we, as a club – and the KP family – made, was to believe that he could translate those skills and the professional performance to elite level. The skills required to run a successful academy are completely different to those required to run an elite Premier League football department. He was made director of football in December 2014. Another well documented fact is that all the systems, staff, players, recruitment systems and other platforms that delivered our success in 2016 and 2021 were in already in place. He deservers very little credit for the title win and marginal credit for the FA Cup win. Instead, his success is measured by when, a few years into his tenure, those systems that had delivered the success needed tweaking and new staff needed to be brought. When he was supposed to build on that platform and continue that success – which, after all, was his job – he failed unbelievably badly. And we are now reaping the "results" of him being in charge. Rudkin happened to be in the right place at the right time when we had our success. The equivalent at arriving and sitting down at ready made table and enjoying a feast. So it looked like he had something to do with it. When he was asked to continue on that success and ensure it becomes standard – well. We see what has happened. Like in any area of business, a person can excel in one area, without excelling at the other. Rudkin's success in the academy is hard to argue against. But his promotion to oversee all football operations at an elite level is one of the worst recruitment decisions made by any Premier League football club ever. There are literally millions of examples of similarly bad hires in companies around the world – dudes do very well in one area, then get promoted to broaden their scope and then fail because it's a completely different job. The difference is, they don't stay in post after the realisation that they aren't up to the job. And that is on KP.

I did that and he is now a Man United fan.

We were once are in League One, you know.

No. It means we only have between 6-7m euros in the bank and Rudkin, using Google Translate (after pretending to Top that he can speak Italian), has somehow managed to cook up a deal where the Granata (Torino) would be able to spend that on our behalf. Luckily, they feel sorry for us and are not prepared to do that.

I know 100% what you're saying here and I totally agree. But one could argue that Rowett had all of those attributes and we got even worse under him. So, ideally, we can find someone who has those qualities AND a bit of an idea of how to set up a team to win football games.

Nothing can put us in a poorer negotiating position than having Rudkin in charge of them. So I really wouldn't worry about it.

Didn't look anywhere near that. Edit to clarify - it looked much less than that.