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Reply | Frey
at 14:46 6 Feb 2025
Someone asked about his stats earlier - he's got 6 goals (none of them penalties) and an assist in 19 games in the league, so just a touch under 1 in 3, or 1 every 192 minutes. Joint 25th in the league out of 325 total scorers (excluding own goals). I'd say that's pretty decent and if it hadn't been for the injury he would likely be higher up the list. |
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Reply | Min-Hyeok Yang
at 14:39 6 Feb 2025
We've got a very diverse team now languge-wise so I'm sure they've thought about how to get instructions across through a language barrier, even if it's just teaching him to understand Jimmy shouting "stop" and "go." |
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Reply | Min-Hyeok Yang
at 10:58 6 Feb 2025
They're singing the Marseillaise, the French national anthem. Someone on Twitter said it was a school group that turned up. |
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Reply | Frey
at 17:26 5 Feb 2025
Yeah, firmly agreed - with or without the defender's touch it's going in. |
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Reply | Frey
at 14:38 5 Feb 2025
Nope, got awarded to him. It takes a little bit of a deflection but his header is on target either way. |
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Reply | Ronnie “ beckenbauer” Edwards
at 14:34 5 Feb 2025
There were a couple of points where he got all the way out to the left wing, laid it off, and his first thought was to run on into space to give an option for a quick pass back. Nothing reckless, it didn't come back to him immediately so he checked himself and dropped back into defence, but interesting that his first thought was a progressive one about carrying on the attack. You could see how much it rattled Blackburn to suddenly have him up there and looking to play forwards. |
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Reply | Teams in the relegation spots 23rd/22nd
at 14:29 5 Feb 2025
Yep - you have to get up to Portsmouth in 20th to find a team averaging that even, the bottom 4 are all at less than a point per game. By the end of the season it could look a lot like 2020-21, where Derby stayed up on 44pts and Sheff Weds went down in 24th on 41. |
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Reply | Ronnie “ beckenbauer” Edwards
at 14:21 5 Feb 2025
Might also be part of the loan deal if we've guaranteed a certain number of appearances/minutes? |
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Reply | Ronnie “ beckenbauer” Edwards
at 22:43 4 Feb 2025
I doubt it because Saints would be bloody mad to let him go. They should be playing him now rather than sending him down to us. |
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Reply | Madsen
at 22:12 4 Feb 2025
Injured. |
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Reply | Vale lifted on QPR’s risky recruit – Signing
at 13:13 4 Feb 2025
I'm not privy to the discussions but I would guess the club didn't see any reason to solve those problems in January because they aren't yet problems - Paal and Dunne are still here until the summer, so your first choices in those positions are available, and we do have cover for them (though I agree that Ashby and Fox/Colback aren't really good or reliable enough if they're asked to play a dozen games in those positions). We need to replace those players, but we don't need to do it today - our problem is they'll be out of contract in the summer, but so will players at other clubs, who we can get for better value than paying a fee in January.
This window has basically been about getting in a couple of loans to cover an emergency in a key position (Edwards) or to add some variety and depth to the bench (Min-Hyeok), which is pretty reasonable when we're sat firmly in mid-table, might manage a run at the play-offs but probably won't, might get relegated but properly won't. The other ones are all signings for the future that we're grabbing now while they're available to be grabbed and it's all about next season. Vale we got for initially nothing, he's meant to be an exciting prospect, and we might prefer him to play further forward but he can cover a variety of roles. We've all complained for ages how thin the squad is; signing a young player who's one of several good options in his preferred position but can also add depth elsewhere is great business if it works out. Esquerdinha the club is clearly excited about but he's an 18 year old who's gone into the development squad initially; he's not here to be first choice, he's here because he was cheap to acquire, doesn't take up a squad place, and in the short term he can back up a weak position for us and hopefully develop into the first choice down the line.
I think we all expect that signings in January are going to be straight in the first team, but that isn't really what's going on here - instead the club is heading off a match preview in ten years' time where Clive asks "Why have we now paid £3m to sign Harvey Vale, 31, made a thousand appearances elsewhere, knees shot to pieces, instead of picking him up when he was available on a free from the Chelsea puppy farm?" |
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Reply | Yang Minh-Hyeok
at 11:20 30 Jan 2025
Really depends on the loan. Sometimes a club has a player on big wages who isn't playing but they can't or won't sell (see Jadon Sancho), or a talented player who's a season away from the first team and can be shopped around to clubs in the division below who couldn't otherwise afford him (like Jesurun Rak-Sakyi this season). In that case they'll be looking for a loan fee or some % of wages or both and are likely to get it, especially if there's competition for the signing. Other times it's just about getting the player competitive minutes, and the club cares more about the style of play of the team he's going to, what the training facilities are like, how closely they can monitor him while he's away. For Spurs we tick a lot of those boxes at the moment (see also getting the pre-season friendly against them), so you'd think we're high up the list of clubs they'd look to make this kind of loan to and while they might want some money for it they might also consider that the wages they're paying a talented 18 year old aren't that big of a deal and they're more interested in fast-tracking his development.
Or sometimes football is football and the player is cheap or free because your chairman's mates with their chairman or their manager used to play for you and fancies doing you a favour (see Hodge and Hayden last season, who I think Clive mentioned at one point were both here for little or nothing). |
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Reply | Santos gone.
at 11:03 30 Jan 2025
On another thread someone mentioned that Kakay didn't want to go out of London on loan last season, I think because he's got a young family. That may be restricting his options a lot. Here's hoping he either gets a club or is financially comfortable enough not to need one - he wasn't quite good enough to be a starter in the Championship but he always tried and seems to be known as a good lad.
It's a shame for Santos that it hasn't worked out, but not a disaster from the club's point of view - picked someone up on the cheap, found it didn't work, moved him on somewhere else quickly to mutual benefit. The model will probably give us a couple of these every season and as long as they go like this that's fine. |
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Reply | Yang Minh-Hyeok
at 19:04 29 Jan 2025
Coming in ready to make a good impression on Sam Field specifically. |
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Reply | Barton
at 11:57 25 Jan 2025
Hate the bloke. Thought it was telling in that Bradley Orr interview a while ago that Barton decided to make it his personal mission to 'smash' Taarabt in training to prove a point. Whatever you might think of Adel's lax attitude to training, he was a massive player for us and Barton, who never had 10% of his ability, went out of his way to try and injure him and undermine the manager's authority in the process. Not the worst thing he's ever done (it's a long list) but demonstrative of his character. |
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Site Scores| Forum Votes: | 160 | | Comment Votes: | 0 | | Prediction League: | 14 | | TOTAL: | 174 |
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