HanoiVillan

Well, I agree with you, but that pretty much has to be what the club think. He's surely too expensive to keep if he's 3rd choice.

I would quite like to continue this ethics of local-media football reporter discussion. I appreciate it's off-topic. Do we actually have a thread where we can talk about this? On-topic, have there been any updates today? And if not, is that 'cos this basically isn't happening? It always seemed a bit too good to be true.

Trent was quoting over 2 years and to be honest we were dangling over the edge and were only safe near the end. Even more to the point, we looked dead and buried in January 2013. No matter what props you give to Lambert for saving us, I don't think it can be said we were always 'relatively safe'.

Wow, that's not great.

"Colombia, a team who have armero in the staring 11, a player who did literally nothing at west ham all season" I love ITV A ludicrously harsh analysis. He only arrived in the January transfer window!

It DOES do it automatically!

To be fair, the policy hasn't changed, it's just that it'll now be promoted by somebody who isn't widely reviled.

Maybe not quite as much as Millar or Vaughters, but a damn sight more than Vinokourov, that's for sure.

Something I often wonder: do you have to type in 'word removed', or is there another word which causes it to be inserted automatically?

Cattermole certainly does do donkey work, there's no doubt about that.

New slogan . . . 'Ron Vlaar - fractionally better than Messi'

Great player, but it doesn't look like there's anything behind the rumours.

You're not seriously pretending that was dependent on signing Ki are you?

No he wasn't. Agreed, he wasn't even in the bottom 10%. He wasn't good enough, but let's not blow things totally out of proportion.

sad to regard Spurs as on another level. I know they are right now, but they shouldn't be. I wouldn't want Delph to go anywhere full stop, but a top 4 team is the only acceptable destination otherwise.

If we have to do 5-3-2 (and I don't like it), then Clark-Vlaar-Okore left-to-right would be the best group of personnel. Senderos shouldn't be starting unless there are injuries. edit: This was in agreement with bobzy, despite my laziness in not actually quoting him.

He would be an amazing addition, top top quality player - hard to believe it could actually happen though.

Obviously it would be best if we could get him to sign a new deal, but after the tournament he's had that ship has sailed. It's about maximising what we get for him at this point, and ensuring that we actually replace him with a quality CB, not just relying on the leftovers and hoping they'll be good enough.

£8m is definitely too much for Bertrand. As I've pointed out before, all his stats for the season are worse than Luna's. That doesn't mean he's a worse player, but it's a pretty good indicator he isn't as much of an improvement as advertised. He looked good for 3 or 4 games, and average to dreadful in the rest. I started out hoping we picked him up, but I don't feel that way any more.

As Bruce Schneier is basically always pointing out, hardly any of those measures do anything at all to combat terrorism.

I take no pleasure in having been right about Froome, but yeah, Wiggins would have been dead weight on the team. His efforts in the Tour de Suisse were professionally embarrassing.

Talking of cycling bets, the guy who runs the velogames.com fantasy site put a £2 bet on Pirazzi to win the stage he did during the giro. Got the winner at 750-1, not a bad win that.

I'll never give a penny of cash to that rag, so could you please give us a little more info on here? Does it say which 8 players?

Not necessarily. Not sure how it doesn't. He clearly wasn't happy with the situation which would be strange if he, like its been said, signed knowing full well he wouldn't play this year. It's just a zombie idea. No matter how many times it gets shot, here it comes again, lurching back to life. Are we a charity for Danish footballers? Did we give him the number 9 shirt as a cruel joke? Is he affecting to be annoyed at a lack of opportunities as some kind of performance art project? If the answer to those questions is 'no', then it's obvious that he was signed to play a role last season. Maybe not a big one or a leading one, but he wasn't signed to do nothing.

It is, what, 72 hours since Lerner issued a statement saying that a takeover was nowhere near and there's basically no interest in the club at the current time, yet here we all are pretending that Lerner's jet is about to do a lap of Europe picking up Cortese and Mancini as it goes. And they say adults don't believe in fairy stories.