OhForAGreavsie

Yes, timing. For periods they make great stops and no mistakes then, for other periods, they make great saves and a noticeable number of mistakes. All of them.

I've noticed Gabriel on pretty much all of your CB option lists, albeit down the page a bit. I like a lot about him, but he seems painfully slow. Would you see that as a deal breaker?

Is Frank Khalid a professional football commentator?

One day football fans are going to stop being delusional about goalkeepers. They ALL make mistakes. Sometimes big and costly ones.

Never has an award been more deserved. I've previously posted my view that Neil is Chelsea's most valuable employee. I absolutely restate that opinion now.

No. Existing club retains the retired player's registration until the most recent contract expires.

I've posted several all touches videos in this thread. I've done so precisely to offer some contrary information to set against the hype. I like Havertz and hope we sign him but he's a human, not an 'extra-terrestrial'. I said in an earlier comment that if we do get him, that, in itself, would be good evidence that he is not as good as we, and specifically me, might have believed. If he were, the bigger beasts would want him and we would have no chance. I see this as a benefit however, not a drawback. If he was good enough to be wanted and bought by more attractive clubs, what good would that do us? It's a Catch-22 situation. We really want him because we think he's a generational talent, but if he was really a generational talent we would never get him. We would be wise therefore not to over estimate Havertz, or to over value him in transfer negotiations. He does still have very desirable attributes mind you. Attributes which make it worth taking our chance to grab him: - - He sees passes which others don't and these are often devastating when they come off. - For someone so strongly one-footed, he has a wider passing arc than we should expect. His good body control allows him to make passes with his left foot that you would think are more likely to be made with the right foot. Teams will obviously target his one-footedness however. - He scores goals including with his head.

N'Golo is definitely loved, and quite rightly, but it is still time to sell.

I think you must be right about this but I also think we should be selling N'Golo this summer. I have fully bought into @Vesper's reasoning on this. Trading N'Golo for someone like Partey or Zakaria makes sense to me, especially if we can do so at a profit.

It's odd that I'm defending Kepa when twenty-four months earlier I was pretty much a lone voice saying that we shouldn't buy him. Life is just great isn't it?

This is received wisdom, it could even be regarded as intuitively obvious, but how do we prove it statistically? How do we rerun the exact same season, with a different goalkeeper and establish the data? My counter case is that we have seen many, many, many keepers create a great reputation when playing for a top side, but look much less good playing for a worse one. The quality of the outfielders affects the impression of the keeper more than the quality of the keeper affects the standard of the team. Clearly there is a quality threshold, I'm not suggesting that anybody off Hackney Marshes would do. Once you have a shortlist of candidates who meet that quality standard however, there are diminishing returns for every extra £5m spent. If a squad's outfield group is stable and strong then yes, of course, go for the best keeper you can afford and add every extra tenth of a percent difference you can get. When you have multiple other needs, as we do, compromise on the keeper and bolster your outfield. The marginal difference between a £40m keeper and a Jan Oblak, for example, serves the team less well, than going with the lower price option and spending £60m-£80m extra on outfielders. This is an assertion. It simply can't be established as fact. There are so many other factors to consider. Starting with, but not limited to, their defenders and our defenders. This generally is my opinion. As an aside however, I do not regard shot stopping as a differentiator. Rather, I see it as an entry level skill. It's not that you get a good job because you're a good shot stopper, it's that you can't get any job at all if you're not. If you're not a good shot stopper you don't even get through the door. For me, the real differentiator is aerial command. Or has our defence shredded Kepa's confidence? It's too complex an interaction to make definitive statements. I'm not saying that managers and fans cannot look at two keepers and decide that they prefer one over another. Nor am I saying that a manager might not conclude that his first choice keeper isn't good enough and needs changing. I am saying don't spend £120m on a keeper if it means you can't attend to other pressing areas of need, I am saying we'll get a better result if we spend £30m on a keeper and £80m on a CB than we'll get sticking with our current CBs and buying Jan Oblak. Indeed, I'm saying we'll get a better result retaining Kepa and buying a top CB, than we'll get by holding on to our CBs and buying Jan Oblak.

it's clear from reading this that you perhaps have not had a chance to look at all of the comments I've made recently in this thread on this subject, or perhaps more likely that I have not explained my point very well. I say that because you're repeating back to me some of the points I've made as if I had not made them. Usually when this happens it is the latter case and I have not explained myself too well. I'll try to do do a wrap up but it's 2:22 a.m. at the moment I haven't got the enthusiasm for it right now. 🙂

Joe Hart is a great illustration of my attitude on goalkeepers. The wildly different opinions of his abilities come about because he does make brilliant saves, and he does mess things up too. All keepers make wonderful saves, pretty regularly in fact, and they all also make howlers. In my opinion, there just isn't enough difference between the best of them, and the worst of them, to ever make it worth spending superstar type amounts to get a goalie. Unless your side's outfield squad is already the best in the world then a club will always, always, always do better to buy a cheaper keeper and spend more on the other ten positions instead. I can't prove it of course but I'm convinced that even those who disagree with what I'm about to say, will change their mind one day; If we had signed Allison, and Liverpool had captured Kepa, they would still be champions, and we would still have been fourth. The thing that makes them a much better team than us is their outfield players, not their goalie. Two years ago I argued we should promote Bulka and forget signing Kepa because the £71m expenditure could never be justified. My idea was ridiculed at the time, but it would have been the right choice. Let's hope we are not about to repeat the error.

Yes, it is the NFL where I first encountered the salary cap. When it was introduced it was about $35m! I no loner follow the sport as avidly as I did in the 80's and 90's, partly because of embarrassment at the name of my team. It's funny but I've been calling them Washington's NFL team for decades and now they do too. Well more-or-less they do. I used Walsall to illustrate the point that some clubs will never be able, independently, to afford the spending of glamour clubs. Nor are they likely to attract an investor who would enable them to, but at least, under the cap, they would be allowed to do it if they could. Under the current system, it wouldn't matter if Jeff Bazos himself bought Walsall, the rule would prevent them spending much more than their natural level. As I said, this makes the current system financial unfair play. Budget caps, not just salary caps, must come to football. It is, in my opinion, virtually certain that full revenue sharing will ever come to football. Even if it did, it would only be within divisions, not entire national pyramids. That could never make sense.. P.S. I also love MLB. Baseball is a wonderful, endlessly fascinating sport, but I hate the NBA with a passion so know next to nothing about it.

Maybe it's already done, pending announcement?

I'm not big on Rice so I'm looking forward to finding out what I've been missing about him up to now. What sort of price are West Ham going accept/want for him? Nothing less that £70m I'd have thought. Could someone like Denis Zakaria be had for less? If so, that's a no contest in my opinion.

I've never believed that FFP is against EU law. Organisations are allowed to set rules of association. If you want to be a football club, and spend whatever you want on transfers and wages no one is stopping you. You just can't join the uefa club. It would be interesting to see this tested and established, one way or the other, once and for all..

What we need is a US style budget cap; a single figure which applies to all clubs. Any club is allowed to spend up to the cap figure, as long as it can do so without falling into unsustainable debt. Just as now, club's books must be subject to annual inspection to ensure that this is so with heavy sanctions if the rules are broken. This is never going to mean that Walsall FC can compete with Barcelona, but it also is never going to mean that they are not even allowed to.

I don't want FFP to be destroyed, I just want it to be altered so that it lives up to its name. That is, I want it transformed from financial unfair play, into something which is genuinely financial fair play. I've said it a zillion times on here before, so apologies for repeating myself, but it is one thing to say that less well-off clubs cannot afford to spend a much as richer ones, but it's altogether a different, and grotesque, thing to say that smaller clubs are not allowed to spend as much as bigger ones, even if backers are prepared to put up the money. How any sporting organisation can make rules which actively create a self-replicating advantage for some of its members over some of the others, is utterly beyond me. A level playing field may not be achievable in reality, but it should at least be the theoretical aim. On the day Platini was appointed head of uefa, I said he was not intelligent enough to hold that job, and so it proved. The G14, or whatever it was at the time, easily manipulated him into enshrining their already huge de-facto advantages, into rules which protect their position. Shameful.

But, but, but... didn't City get off on a technicality? Namely that regulations stipulate a time limit between offence and charge, and that this limit had expired? It may be that City could have been found not guilty in substance, but the charge timed out so CAS never gave that determination. They simply said out of time, thank you and goodbye. So, if my understanding is correct, the City case is not a precedent for what others can get away with.

I remember when we first chased him, some, including me, raved about his qualities and were totally in favour of signing him, while others were unimpressed. For myself I liked his power, his one on one defending, his poise in possession and his ability to carry the ball out from the back. I have not watched him this year so can't really offer a current opinion on him but, I previously rated him so highly that my only red flag against trying to get him now is the excessive price tag. Given our urgent need, I'd consider paying big, but not that big.

Wow, as much as that? It was £1.92m per place last season but I didn't know the details for this season.

This will be interesting. A month and a half ago I posted that I couldn't understand why some lists of this kind did not include Puli as a starter. Don't think any will exclude him now.