Monroe Transfer

Love this

Got a strong feeling Pardew will be all about 442 next season unfortunately.

Am hoping it's just Liverpool trying to drum up interest/agent-talk. Don't get me wrong, he's not that bad, but for the money I reckon we could do better and I'd love for us to get a younger English player like Ince or Sinclair. Seems like ages since we properly invested in British youth (albeit at 24 Sinclair is pushing anyone's definition of youth).

Read above mate, papers linking us more with Downing now.

Puma kits actually aren't that bad quality-wise if you ask me. I bought the Dortmund home shirt a short while back.

No thanks. He's 29 and will be on silly wages. Would much, much rather we paid a 3-4 million more to get Tom Ince tbh. I'm sure Ashley would be aware that he'll have no sell-on value by the end of his contract too. Just seems a bit unimaginative too if we're after a striker.

Yeah, thought that... for some stupid reason that bothered me. In the article that accompanies that, his quotes come before Pardew's too. Means little in the grand scheme of things I guess, but still.

Pretty sure one of Bent or Gomis will be in. To be honest, ignoring the fact that the guy is a clear twat, I always wanted Remy + one other. Simply because Remy = more options.

Caught me off guard that.

On the extended interview Kinnear says "we've got a second hitlist (of strikers) in case these three (Remy, Gomis, Bent) fall through". Much as going after our second choices is a little unsettling, I welcome the notion that the club won't just go "oh well, we tried, Cisse, Shola and Campbell it is" should we not get the aforementioned targets in. He also mentions another area of the pitch that he plans to focus on when the striker situation is sorted. Hopefully it involves wide players. Still reckon the McCarthy deal won't happen unless Cabaye leaves.

That's the first Kinnear interview I've read/seen that I've not immediately felt angered/embarrassed by.

Come on mate, you'll need to try a bit harder than that.

ALE

Hey come on now, HBA is no Jozy Altidore edit; noone saw that typo, right?

Are you suggesting he should have said "er, actually, Cabaye isn't very good, definitely not Man Utd quality" or something? Plus he didn't say that Cabaye is in the same league as Rooney and Ronaldo, just that quality players are going to be speculated about. Which is true and not controversial in the slightest. To be fair a lot of people like yourself see Pardew commenting on players like Cabaye in the worst possible context, i.e. that he's trying to sell them on. I can empathise with that, sometimes I think he'd be better off saying nothing at all, but other times I think the likes of yourselves are twisting his words to make them sound worse than perhaps Pardew meant them to be.

It happens all the time.

Talks to his bosses' sports 'news' website, and praises said boss on it. What's the big deal? He's hardly going to say anything else in that situation is he?

At 8pm? Been sleeping all day?

An entertaining read... ... but in future i'd maybe suggest giving each club its own thread. Putting the two together like this made the whole thing a little long-winded.

My kind of woman.

So that's where you've been for the past few months...

There aren't clubs queuing up to buy him, and Remy is worth far more if they can sell him, or even for a loan fee. Plus like I alluded to above, I think clubs with the relative financial might (in that division) of ourselves 4 years ago and QPR today can afford to hold on to a few established Premier League players. Especially with parachute payments being what they are.

Firstly, every club that gets relegated automatically becomes a selling club. Players like Martins were never going to stick around because a) they wouldn't want to, and we only could keep a few of the top earners at the club in the CHampionship season, so the likes of Martins had to go to get them off the wage bill. Thus it's ludicrous of you to attempt to link selling anyone that summer to us being a "selling club". Especially given how much credit Ashley and the club received for holding on to high earners such as Coloccini, a tactic that paid dividends as we got promoted with ease. Secondly, in certain situations, players are going to go regardless of whether the club really want to sell them or not. The likes of Enrique and Given more or less forced their moves, whereas the likes of Ba had clauses in their contracts and took advantage of said clauses when a better club came along. More often that not we've replaced players well, and I think you're exaggerating the abilities of the likes of Best. He's not a great loss. You seem unable to seperate different contextual situations from this idea that we're a selling club. Thirdly, you seem to love this "shop window" phrase a bit too much. A manager gets asked a question, he answers it fairly and in some cases makes it clear (to any clubs interested) that if anyone wants to buy a particular player, that he won't come cheap. We're not the biggest/wealthiest club so there's little point making it clear such and such player won't get sold because that could come back to haunt the manager - as it did with Carroll (the timing of his departure was awful, but he was never worth that much money and it made sense to sell him). Milner being sold like he was was a shame, but at the time I and many others saw it as good business because £12m seemed over his market value. Only in hindsight were we perhaps wrong, although Man City paid too much for him too. If Pardew started going on the radio and saying "he's a great player, he'd fit in well at Man Utd, they should bid for him" then I would agree with you that he's touting our players. But he's not doing that.

To ensure he doesn't get injured. He's leaving them whatever happens to get him off the wage bill.

Drug smuggler.