ram59

What's the combined cost of the Leicester squad? Make them give all their players away, including their youngsters that they have nurtured. Make them sign only free agents on limited wages and then we'll see, especially with teams treating it as their cup final every week. Quite often, big teams are humbled or struggle against league 1 opposition in the cup, even with their mega expensive players. It would be interesting to see how they would cope, having the big name, but without the big players to go with it

No matter where you are in the football ladder, you will get the moaners. I used to listen to talksport and the fivelive phone ins, listening to top 6 clubs' fans moaning about their teams. It used to drive me mad, so I don't bother anymore. Even locally, villa fans, after about 15 consecutive home wins, were moaning how rubbish the football was. 🙄

No matter what measurement you use for offside, there's always got to be a critical cut off point, which will create controversy. Say you legislate a player is only offside if there's a 1m gap between him and a defender, you'll get disputes when a player is 1.01m offside. Like the widely accepted goal line technology, we could have offside technology using sensors in the ball to check the precise moment it is played and monitors that the players already wear to denote their position on the pitch. You'd still have to decide who's interfering with play, but technology could solve many issues.

Who's paying his wages hire and when is fairly irrelevant. A package has been agreed whereby Bristol pay us a sum for his transfer and allow him to stay for the remainder of the season. I'm sure the methodology of how the finances have been sorted out, will have been done with our business plan in mind, much like the unusual CBT package.

The fee was undisclosed

We're getting to the interesting stage of the season, where it's not about the opposition but about ourselves. The teams who are successful will be the ones coping with the pressure best. The opposition may be fighting relegation and giving it everything, defying their lowly position, teams with nothing to play for may play with the freedom of pressure and play better for it, other opponents at the top will be going for it. If I've learnt anything from all the failed years of trying to get into the premier, it is that you can't pre judge how the opposition will play on any day.

You'd better put some money on it then, Odds checker has got them at 1500 to 1, for promotion.

Another potential crock who's not likely to be match fit for a few weeks, sounds like a perfect fit for Derby.

I've always judged Collins on what he brings to the team as a whole. He runs his socks off, pressuring opposing defenders, preventing them starting dangerous attacks at source. It's not easy to have a stat to back this up. While he wasn't amongst the goals, he was criticised for not scoring enough, now he's being downgraded for the amount of penalties he puts away. With the exception of the last penalty, all of the others have been been put away with comfort. It's nice to have a player in the team willing to take them. Many times in the past, we haven't had the luxury of having a decent penalty taker.

In an ideal world, we would have had yesterday's offer for Bird, put in at the start of the transfer window, the we could have spent it on a striker. But unfortunately we can't dictate when other clubs decide to do their business. Also, the club made it clear that they offered Bird a new contract, but he decided not to accept. Once in this position, the club decided to accept what they believed to be a good offer. This deal appears to have been inflated by interest from Hull, but unfortunately not early enough.

Like everyone else I'm disappointed that we couldn't get a striker over the line, but all this talk about the worst ever transfer window needs to be put into context. Since the start of the window we have signed Nyambe, who we all feared would be on his bike. We did sign a striker in TJJ, who's fitness would have been assessed by the club or we could have let him go back to Arsenal spend the money on Smith only for him to possibly pick up an injury. Statistically, CBT seems to be an exciting signing which could go a long way to preventing burnout in players like NML. Likewise, Adams will hopefully give the midfield a boost. Crucially we feared losing Cashin and/or. Bird for the run in, which hasn't happened. The extra money from Bird will go into the summer transfer pot. Hopefully, we will soon see Washington and Waggy back and Brown benefiting from some adult game time when he returns. I think that we were one, admittedly important, signing away from a good transfer window, but it could have been so much worse.

Only pencil, I'd prefer ink?

As I've said above, Charlton can transfer CBT to Derby during the summer transfer window and crucially before his contract expires at Charlton. So, if all parties are happy, I don't see any problems.

He didn't have real pace, but he had a trick or two and could cross it on to a sixpence. Sadly, his career nose dived after leaving us for Villa. I remember speaking to him after an away reserves match at villa park, he wasn't happy. He quickly fell down to non League football before ending up running a bar in Spain. He was featured in a reality TV programme and must have weighed 20 stone, but they threw a football at him and he instantly controlled it and juggled it from one foot to another, showing great ball control.

The agreement with Charlton is for a loan to the end of the season followed by a free transfer. The loan will finish after the play off final date and the free transfer will take place as soon as the transfer window opens middle of June. CBT will be contracted to Charlton to 30th June, so I don't see a problem. It's not as if we're waiting for him to become a free agent at the end of his current contract. Plenty of players are 'signed' by a new club before the window officially opens.

Now that the signing has been confirmed, over had a look at the YouTube videos. Obviously, they only show the positive aspects of his game. His pace is up there with NML and when they're on the pitch together, the opposition won't be able to double up on both of them, so leaving at least one with more space. Another positive is that he seems slightly more comfortable on his weaker foot than NML is. Regarding the criticism about his lack of decision and ball control at times, if he didn't have any weaknesses to his game, he'd be signing for a top end premier team, not a league one team, at his age. Playing at such speed makes it so much more difficult to make the correct decisions all the time and to control the ball. For the first time in a while, I am excited by a signing.

It's great to finally get this one over the line, whether he'll be an improvement on what we already have, remains to be seen. More importantly, he takes the pressure off NML somewhat, we tend to rely on him too much and at times he seems to have been overworked. Now, we can afford to use NML more effectively, resting him when needed and together with the other wide players, maintain 90+ minutes of pressure on opposing fullbacks.

We had all this when we tried to sign Marvin Johnson on loan from them in the summer. Even though he wasn't their 25 man squad, they still wouldn't budge. We either pay them or move on and stop wasting our time.

I think that this deal shows that there's always a way round things. If there's a player out there, we can loan him for a large loan fee and then 'buy' him for next to nothing in the summer.

Not really, it's not an unheard of way of doing things and may have something to do with our 'restrictions'.

If Sibley takes the corners, it allows CH to position himself on the edge of the area, waiting for a loose ball or a direct pass from Sibley.

It depends whether DC can fund a 'forest' type gamble. For accounting purposes, we don't need to balance the books until 30th June. If we don't get promotion, purchases in this month can be offset by sales in June. Bird would be on his way with a compensation fee, which is likely to be in excess of CBT type fees. If we did get promotion, cash injection into the club would still be required, but I'm sure that this would be funded by the much bigger standard income from the following year, some way or another.

Good result today and with another good result on Wednesday, Nyambe could be back for the weekend.

First they try to move the goal posts with the timing of Johnson's transfer, now they want to literally move the goalposts or free kick position after the match.😁

I don't think that we had much choice at the time, we were in desperate need of money and the offer was too good to refuse for a player which hadn't yet set the world alight.