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Reply | Azor Matusiwa
at 17:32 10 Jul 2025
I hear that the Sally Army can't afford professional footy style medical teams, so they make you do the medical at your local GP.
Euphonium at 8 in the morning to get an appointment!
It's hot outside, ok....? |
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Reply | Assuming Hutch goes (and he clearly will)
at 11:02 10 Jul 2025
Hopefully he becomes disillusioned with his lack of first team football and is available on the cheap, or for loan, when we're re-promoted. |
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Reply | Assuming Hutch goes (and he clearly will)
at 11:01 10 Jul 2025
Yes, this was a very worrying thing to read. If it's the real intention, then I wonder who will be sold in order to make this figure? Delap, Davis, Hutch, Muric, presumably?
If it's not the real intention, then why on earth write something like that? It's in unambiguous terms, and it makes you wonder about some of those involved in running the club. Anyone who has any power over the generation of £100m should be more careful or more able to use language accurately.
It's not great that the club is having to deny that it's for sale. Whether the squad is for sale remains to be seen. It would be nice to have a clarificatory statement from Brett Johnson, to be honest. |
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Reply | Are we aiming too high?
at 12:20 9 Jul 2025
Indeed, but that emphasises the importance of recruiting globally. The way that some smaller/middle-sized premier league teams have competed, and traded up, is by recruiting relative unknowns with genuinely big upsides.
Meanwhile we have recruited premium price players with potential who are known about by everyone. If some of them come good, fine, but (a) there's a lot of money spent on those who don't, and (b) if the ones that do come good have a relegation release clause that allows much of our potential profit to be eaten, then our strategy clearly isn't that sound.
Ashton recognises that mistakes have been made, and of course we need to get behind the team in the present and trust the club management to be laying foundations for a more comprehensive scouting network for the future. |
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Reply | Why have we only now just put in an actual bid for Cajuste? (n/t)
at 13:16 8 Jul 2025
The better questions are:
1) "Why do you make assumptions when you have no knowledge of what is going on at the Club on a day to day basis?"
2) "Why do you make assumptions when you know that you have no knowledge of what is going on at the Club on a day to day basis?"
3) "Why are those assumptions predisposed to assume the worst of the Club rather than the best?"
and
4) "Why do you allow those assumptions to override the information that Phil has and trusts, which is that we've already made overtures to try to keep Cajuste?" |
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Reply | Any thoughts on the Brighton Kit Controversy
at 13:13 8 Jul 2025
The difference in product names is horrendous. I note that the £120 version has a little patch saying "authentic licensed product", whereas the £85 version does not.
I hope the Club realises that it's saying "It's fine to buy kit which is not authentic if you want to pay less than £120". Well be careful what you wish for, street vendors here we come!
I mean really, this is starting to sound like satire now, what some of these clubs are doing. Buying a match worn kit, or a signed kit, sure, you'd expect to pay a massive premium. Market forces, yada yada, all understood.
But selling different tiers of mass produced kits and implying that something that's £85 is not "authentic" is an absolute disgrace, even for those of us who have long accepted that there is not an unseverable umbilical cord between a club and a town's working class.
One day I hope that FC United of Manchester compete with Man Utd in a similar way to AFC Wimbledon against the MK Don'ts. |
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Reply | Because we’re not allowed to worry…
at 12:59 7 Jul 2025
We have this from some people every season. Every transfer window even.
Yes, bringing players in early might be ideal. But I would rather bring in the right player on the wrong date, than the wrong player on the right date.
We have done the Delap deal early. Regardless of how much of that sum is available to spend, it was a deal which has a huge impact on our finances, both for PSR purposes, and real cash flow/balance sheet purposes. So transfer business has started early, and we know more of the parameters within which we'll be working than we did.
Of course, there comes a time when it becomes concerning if we are behind the curve, especially if we were to lose a key player (Hutch?) very late in the day. But I suspect we have little control over that.
Furthermore, we simply don't know how far advanced any overtures are, in either direction. It is madness to allow our sentiment to be seriously affected by unevidenced rumours. But it is even more ridiculous to allow our sentiment to be seriously affected by the perceived lack of unevidenced rumours. Remember, and this is often overlooked, that we only get a small piece of the true picture, we don't know how much of the picture we are getting, and the part that we do get is often random (which agent has the loosest lips, which staff member overhears which conversation, which target happens to have a release clause, etc).
If we get promotion, I don't suppose anyone will be caveating their celebrations with a pang of irritation that any wonderful new transfers were signed in late July rather than early July. And I'm yet to see any data showing that earlyish signings are markedly better than late-ish ones.
Even once the window is over, we won't know how successful our window has been. Most fans were happy with last summer's window, even before we knew that Delap would turn out to be anywhere near as good as he did turn out to be. But in retrospect, it turns out that that window wasn't such great shakes, across the board, in terms of what we needed in the Prem. Even now, we maybe don't know what kind of assets (or liabilities) some of those players will be - Greaves, JClarke, Ogbene, Muric? if we can't conclusively judge a window that finished almost a year ago, it's madness to start judging a window that is still very wide open.
Asking when you're allowed to worry suggests you're already worrying. There's presently no reason to worry. That is all that matters. |
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Reply | Kit drop official
at 14:35 5 Jul 2025
Yes to me it really looks like the 1986/87 kit (when the away kit was also red), right down to the little red accents on the very similar collar. The first kit I ever owned. However, that was adidas and this is Umbro, which is slightly odd in itself, but it also means we can't have the stripes on the shoulders/sleeves. If it were adidas and we had the stripes, it would only be the Fisons that's missing! |
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Reply | Erosion of team Ashton / McKenna
at 14:31 5 Jul 2025
But who is ABOVE Mark?
The failure to have a Chairman sitting alongside him as a mentor, and also as a proper check and balance is a real headscratcher to me. I think it's a poor decision, I really do. But hey, let's hope we nail it on the pitch this season, and the issue will become academic. |
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Reply | Interesting Perspective
at 21:49 1 Jul 2025
I appreciate the sentiment behind that, and I've been very impressed the way that Brighton have kept achieving when they've lost managers. It will be interesting to see what happens to Brentford.
But there are some exceptions to this really, in the sense that many organisations can't do much to guard against their top dog being poached. When we hired Kieran, we took a punt. We did our research, it paid off. But sometimes these decisions won't pay off, at least not to that extent. And given that we're not Spurs or Man Utd, at some time, we will lose him. It won't be the fault of the supporters or the club or Ashton. And although he can have other coaches working under Kieran, you can't have two managers at any one time (unlike footballing positions in your squad), so it's very difficult to see what we can really do in order to make it 'no big deal' when he is eventually tempted elsewhere. |
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Reply | Always liked Pearson
at 21:43 1 Jul 2025
I anticipate all, or nearly all, of our squad this year showing their support for the very small minority whose preferences include Tingly Ted's... |
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Reply | Narrrwichhh
at 14:14 1 Jul 2025
Just out of interest, I looked up the Ipswich and Norwich all time records. Norwich lead by 8 fans per game (17,886 − 17,878), according to ChatGPT (yes yes, disclaimer suitably issued), which would mean that we would need to beat them by 765 fans per game this season in order to overtake their all time record. Let's make it happen. |
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Reply | Farewell Bryan
at 16:22 24 Jun 2025
It's a great shame.
It doesn't exactly stop us in our tracks and remove the optimism that doubtless will grow for the new season, but it's a shame to lose a great servant, and it's a shame to give the Budgies anything to Crow about. |
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Reply | Nice one Dara! (n/t)
at 16:19 24 Jun 2025
Really pleased with this news.
Statement of intent. Important to keep the squad together to a large extent, especially those who performed better and have good experience.
We will have some successes in this regard, and we will have some failures. That's life. Delap was unavoidable, Burgess was one that presumably Kieran was comfortable with. The question marks now I suppose are Omari and Axel. I'd love to keep both, but if we lose Axel and keep Omari, then that will have been a decent window on the retention side. And we know that Dara can play over on the right if needs be.
Centre mid rebuild, another striker, decisions decisions on keepers, and we'll see what else comes out of left field. Metaphorically speaking.
I really do think Morsy will play a bigger part this coming season than some think, and he should remain club captain. No problem with Dara being captain when Morsy's not on the pitch though, of course.
I suspect we've had to pay big wages for Dara, but needs must. We wouldn't have been able to attract similar (proven) quality at this level, probably even paying over the odds.
I also imagine there will be some kind of release clause in the event that we don't go back up. In this particular case, that would be entirely fair enough, and justified. His choice was either to force a move to a Premier League club, which I'm sure he could've done, and risked that club being in /another/ relegation battle, or stay with Town and commit to the project of trying to get us up and stay up. If risking losing him next year in the event of a failed promotion bid is the price of making our promotion bid stronger, then it's a no brainer. |
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Reply | Have that lot up the road
at 18:25 21 Jun 2025
Norwich's CB department is strengthening.
Ours is weakening.
Both of these facts are regrettable.
However, I would swap our CB department for theirs. Or any other department for that matter. |
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Reply | Cajuste
at 19:47 20 Jun 2025
The honest truth is that none of us has seen the contract between ITFC and Napoli, so speculation about details in the terms is somewhat pointless.
Nobody knows what the terms of the option were, in circumstances in which we were relegated. Still less do we know the extent to which any such option binds the player in those circumstances. |
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Reply | Philip Billing?
at 14:21 20 Jun 2025
Surely not? We all have automatic direct debits, no? |
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