Andrew3000

I think Rooney will step up. He made occasional errors but I can’t remember him having a bad game. On top of that he’s got physical presence 

Bit of both 

Glad we’ve got all that pesky football out of the way and we can start looking forward to the real reason we love this sport…
 
The Summer Transfer Window opens Thursday! The summer sagas, the twists and turns, the crushing blows when a free agent goes elsewhere, the highs when we see a Twitter announcement from the club, the disappointment when tweet literally anything else that’s not a signing, Imminent!, 48 hours!, what will be the journalistic buzzword this year?, what Twitter account can we trust, will Nixon show any form or consistency?, when will Barry the Ram turn up?
Best time of year!
😉

It's impossible to say until we've signed some players. We could have a really good window, or a terrible one. Either way it guarantees nothing come the first day of the season.
But with the potential for us to recruit, and almost everything we can offer as a club being better than our League One competition, this really is a big chance for us. Bookies have us at 5/1 to win the league, it was 6/1 before the final so it shows that they think our biggest competition is now gone. I'm surprised the odds are so short given the squad we currently have. Maybe in a couple months, but that isn't a great bet right now.

Really tough on Barnsley, happy for Darren Moore, but Barnsley maybe even deserved to win, plus VAR was up to its usual useless self.
From a selfish point of view, it’s better for our chances next year. In commentary they said Barnsley expected to be between 8th and 12th in line with their budget compared to the other sides, I can’t see that changing next year. In terms of budgets, we won’t know exactly how much we can spend but it’s going to be within the top 2 or 3 in the division you’d think.

Happy for DM.
Bannans pitch map was ridiculous. Fair play to him for driving that team forward. 

I reckon I can be convinced that we’re not the worst team in PL history.  As quoted in another thread we spent about £15M to get to 11 points.  Leicester have spent over £400M and almost half that again as their wage bill to get to 33 points and relegation.  Makes sense in my head!!

Once you've seen the resemblance you can't un-see it...

Yeah I’m really embracing the excitement. Tbh, I prefer the wheeler dealer nature of our trading these days over the 2015 Mel era where you knew we would be blowing millions. It feels a lot more exciting knowing it’s low risk but you might find an Ebiowei or a Mcgoldrick and all the signings can’t really fail to meet expectations as there are none.
When we were signing Johnson et al, they were doomed from the start. I’d say in hindsight Johnson was a decent player for us but I always thought he was gash because of the price tag

He's been a great servant. Absolutely stellar in so many ways. I felt his time was going to come when Cocu arrived and the Academy was going to be front and centre, but alas that all spiralled out of control. When you look at our return on investment, it's been surprisingly poor, for one reason or another, and that shows the danger of putting too much faith in it.
At the moment we have Sibley, Cashin, Bird and Knight which is incredibly impresive, but given we're a third division team with a Category 1 academy you'd hope we'd have some players to show for it. Maybe Liam Delap and Kaide Gordon were the ones who got away?
We won the English league and competed well in Europe. Timi Elsnik and Jack Stretton came close. Max Lowe, Jayden Bogle, Festy Ebesole, Lee Buchanan, Dylan Williams, Luke Thomas, Farrend Rawson, Morgan Whittaker, Archie Brown, Mason Bennett, Calum Guy and Kelle Roos all hint at us producing good players but not great players. Will Hughes and Jeff Hendrick, from the early days, have reached highest without quite fulfilling their early promise. 
If there had been a better overall plan of academy to first team I think we'd have seen the real benefit and I thought Wass should one day become the first-team coach overseeing his charges, but like it all it's been nearly but not quite. We probably won't know exactly how important and how good he's been until he's gone and we see what changes. A new broom is sweeping through the club and I think that's no bad thing, plus now we're in our second season in the third tier, we really do have to cut our cloth accordingly.
But huge thanks to Darren Wassall for everything.

Roos was 21 or 22 when he joined us.
Agree with the rest though. Fundamentally, only having sold Jeff Hendrick for more than £10m it's actually quite disappointing. Obviously, injuries to Hughes probably hurt the prospect of another big sale and then financial issues prevented others, but when you look to the likes of those down the road and the amount of money they got for Oliver Burke et al it does look poor.

That bit does make sense to me. Darren used to coach under 23s when he was Academy Manager. He was made up to Director (was it when he stepped down from caretaker role for first team?) and Pat Lyons took over under 23s. It created an extra layer that we maybe don't actually need. 

I’m still in favour of the Brentford b team model I think it’s more about scrapping it and therefore no longer needed. With a B team you buy players likely to make the progress both teams learn the same approach tactics and formation then easier transition 

Meanwhile, the saintly ascended beings of the DLF progress naturally to Nirvana, for as much as the trees and stars they have a right to be there

I watched a documentary on Rolf Harris and the next day I found out he had died.
Does anyone know if there’s a Nigel Farage documentary?

I’m going with a week on Friday 
DCFC Admin ‘here’s one for a sonny day’ ☀️ 👀 
‘ Derby County are delighted to announce the signing of Sonny Bradley from Luton Town FC on a pre contract agreement.
Sonny has put pen to paper on a deal until 2025.
 

I know you just want to turn it into a thread full of FIAT puns but I refuse to Panda to that

They do ! We rotate between, Darley Abbey, Markeaton and Allestree parks and an occasional short one round rykneld rec. do any of them too often (3 days in a row maximum ) and she gets bored, all plodding, and gloomy like a kid going “boring boring boring” try a new place and she’s all woooa ! This is interesting, catch you later, off on a squirrel hunt 

Whilst I can imagine that would disappoint a few, I agree. If you look at it, none of that bunch really went on to do a great deal  given the fees, potential, etc.
Short did ok at Everton but the rest of them didn't really do a great deal. Tommy did ok at Villa and Celtic just doesn't count. Kitson did ok but Newcastle and West Ham weren't great at the time - they certainly didn't end up going on to have amazing careers. 
Marco always looked the part and was a solid player but in reality, wasn't great was he.
Fetches tin hat...

Found this website, which lists all the free agents across the top four divisions, which seems rather useful.
https://footballfragmento.wordpress.com/tag/championship-released-players/

Love this idea. Iceland is incredibly beautiful. Players could run miles across volcanic sand and then chill out in a natural volcanic spring after. And broaden their horizons with visits to places like Gullfoss, the golden waterfalls. And challenge themselves to be as hard as the Vikings through the season.

I think only Morrissey hasn't aged well. He is under-developed psychologically, his implied political stances and his contemptuous refusal to explain them or refute them are  unpleasant and his solo work steadily got worse after a few good uns.
The Smiths music still sounds great to me, especially the remastered versions!
Agree about Andy Rourke though, terrific bass player.

I think only Morrissey hasn't aged well. He is under-developed psychologically, his implied political stances and his contemptuous refusal to explain them or refute them are  unpleasant and his solo work steadily got worse after a few good uns.
The Smiths music still sounds great to me, especially the remastered versions!
Agree about Andy Rourke though, terrific bass player.

3pm kick off, Saturday 8th July 

I think only Morrissey hasn't aged well. He is under-developed psychologically, his implied political stances and his contemptuous refusal to explain them or refute them are  unpleasant and his solo work steadily got worse after a few good uns.
The Smiths music still sounds great to me, especially the remastered versions!
Agree about Andy Rourke though, terrific bass player.