Personally i've cheered myself up but loading up football manager and having a look in Sunderlands reserves, in a sort of a Bullseye 'and this is what you could have had way...'

At least PJ has the managerial ability to look further than a prior clubs cast offs.

Sheiki is free ...

Why o why do we fail so often to attract talent to our club?? Is it the area in which we live? Perhaps the slower pace of life or the preconceived view that we all chew carrots & drive bloody tractors. No, i think it may be that the powers that be (Clegg & co) don,t sell perspective transfer targets the vision & dream of success hard enough. Will they ever learn?

By the way, i still believe we now have the manager to take us on to bigger & better things, just miffed at missing out yet again. Onwards & upwards COYB.

Too be honest I don't think we have missed out by not signing Austin.

I live in Swindon and have seen him play a few times. True he knows where the net is, but some of the defences in league 1 are bloody awful. He may struggle in the Championship, he may not. Time will tell.

Plus you cannot blame him, if I went for two job interviews and one offered £6k a week and the other £12k a week, I think I know which one I would choose.

CLEGG IS A USLESS PIECE OF CRAP, HE'S THE ONE WHO NEEDS TO LEAVE THE CLUB. AND AUSTIN IS ON 7.5K AT BURNLEY NOT 12.

leadbitter6 - if that's true [7.5K a week] then I'll eat my hat.

Basically the absolute bullpoo some people chat on this website scared him away.

Ipswich fans come to believe that we have some God given right to be in the Premier League/sign top class players.

The fact is, we put way to much pressure on the players we have and even the one's we are pursuing. Charlie Austin is young and isn't at all proven at this level. Everyone was certain he'd take us to the Premier League with a massive goal tally and he hadn't even signed for us yet.

Don't get me wrong, I love Ipswich Town FC. I desperately want us to get promoted. We all just need to calm down. Nothing is going to happen over night. We are no bigger than a lot of clubs in the Championship.

Absolutely GUTTED about this....
Hence the silence.....
We have no chance of challenging in this league if we can't bring in any players.
I hope to God we don't now send Scotland out,- paramount to suicide.
There need to be 3 teams below us at the end of the season, thats all,There need to be 3 teams below us at the end of the season, thats all.....

poor bugger imagine having to live and work in burnley.what language do they speak up there ?

There is a time and tide in the affairs of football clubs as in the affairs of men. Many ITFC fans are thirsting to buy into a new vision - 9000 at the Sheik's palace indicate as much. (OK: no guarantees, but if there were, it wouldn't be a vision!) This wave of optimisim would almost certainly result in increased interest, attendances and intake. Of course we don't know what happened with Austin, but I still feel the negotiations have been done with a blinkered eye only on the immediate finances and without sensitivity to the bigger picture - that football is not just a business, and that, a bit like the stock market, fortunes rise and fall on confidence. OK, I may be totally wrong about Austin. Perhaps it just wasn't possible to break the wage structure, period! But what then about Drury? That we can't tie up a £150, 000 deal with a non-league club doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Let's hope that the visionary shoots PJ's signing has uncovered don't turn into something that feels more like a boat that was missed. COYB.

one day we might wake up and spend some money to help get us promoted ha ha ?

Yet another hot prospect slips through the net. He will be an instant success for Burnley, I can just tell.

Disappointing as this is the big question for me is how does this sit with Paul Jewell ? If he is in agreement with the club not meeting Austin's wage demands (if that was the problem) then fine. If however that is not the case then this is surely a massive kick in the teeth for the new manager and a huge failure on the part of Evans and Clegg to back his judgement. Chances are we will never know.

Maybe the midfielder from Luton is not happening because Jewell has convinced Norris to stay. I believe we have made the best signing possible this month which was getting Paul Jewell in and I believe he will improve our team in all areas over the coming months but it might take a few transfer windows to get there. We need patience because as we have experienced in the past the quick fix doesnt work.

the great tax dodger in charge probably doesn't want to attract attention to him self by flashing the chequebook you people don't understand the pressure of being a tax dodging unpatriotic englishman based in the west indies with a company who makes all their profits here but pays all their taxes at a lot lower rate somewhere else.frankly it can be very hard . all those helicopter flights can cause savage vibrations in the kneebones and testicular tremors with all those horrible side effects...yes indeed its a lot easier to pay your taxes in england or just sign on and sell home grown veggies at the market rule brittania off' with their heads etc

pinewoodblueboy, we may be ''in the sticks and crunching carrots, but Canaries dont seem to have problems signing players ,ITS NOT location .I THINK Austin found the negociations hard to understand, Clegg sitting there repeating the mutterings of the man next to him with a carrier bag over his head . Forget Prem whilst they are running club IT WILL NOT HAPPEN .

money grabber

there are many clubs in the championship that have money to spend, when the bright prospects become available we are just one club in the mix, it is important to have a wage structure and town fans need to be more patient.

Move on
We didnt get him coz he went to play for someone he knows well - who has always wanted him and plus fact he is on about £5k more a week
You must understand that clubs have wage structures
As for Austin sitting there not understanding - too right - all due respects to the lad has two good feet and a talent at football - he has an agent who does all the dealing - Austin would have been sitting there hood up with his I pod on
Agents do deals not players and I have met afew agents and believe me - they are out for one person - No 1 so simple - it is an auction - Football is not run like any other business
Oh and look what happens when you throw money at it to buy players .. 2001 ..I think we all remember that !!! Has fun against Inter - that was about the highlight that season!!!

Nobody that posts on here knows 100% why the deal wasn't done so we can only speculate, everyone will rightly have an opinion but it doesn't mean every opinion is right, we may have pulled the plug on the deal due to austins attitude, perhaps Austin felt that the move just didn't feel right, perhaps his demands went beyond financial reasoning like wanting a garaunteed starting place if fit, perhaps his ambition didn't meet ours, perhaps he did want money higher than what the wage structure in place to protect the club from from making the mistakes we made that nearly sent us to the wall, perhaps clegg/Evans or jewell said the wrong things, perhaps the media were wrong to publicise the details and raise false hope, what ever the reason he has gone elsewhere, could it be a blessing in disguise? Time will tell, would we have been a better team with him? Who knows for sure. I think in the midst of this we have forgotten that the last few weeks at the club have been really positive, a wave of optimism has swept through the place and a togetherness amongst supporters had been evident but more importantly the team/squad have shown this as well, on weds morning although we lost in a brave show against arsenal there was a positive vibe with the impending arrival of Bullard, we are in the same position now as were then!

I think some people on here are clouding the issue with the comparison between the failure to sign Austin and the Bullard loan.
See? I said LOAN. Bullard is not a risk. He's only on loan until the end of the season and I'm sure if he was always injured, we'd be sending him back.
Austin ~ imagine if we'd smashed our wage structure and signed him for 3 1/2 years and he turned out to be not up to it at this level! We'd be stuck with an expensive mistake.
Don't get me wrong, I really wanted him to sign but - not at the expence of a wage structure (which, I agree, needs reviewing if we have ambitions of going up to the Prem) and I want players who want to play for the Town NOT ones who have be talked/begged/bribed to do so.
Let's move on and get behind PJ and the boys!

The lad Austin is a fool. The North West is a sh**hole.

bluedragon your figures are wrong. I actually do know the salary he's on and you're a few grand out. This is besides the point - we need to move on and gear up for the next one. COYB

the amount of people calling for cleggs head after this deal, who's to say it was cleggs fault? Austin probably demanded too much which is fair enough, if you have a number of clubs after you, naturally you push them for a good deal. Also, i dont think its worth the risk putting him on high wages. Yes he's proved in a lower league but the championship is a quality league, and there's no guarantee that he'll score goals. I think the board are just being cautious after the amount of money we wasted on players such as lee martin and priskin(hopefully both will prove me wrong in the near future)