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Yes please

Thoughts and prayers, @Worthy Nigelton and @GJL Mid-Norfolk Canary

Seems fine to me. He very clearly hasn't given Wagner long-term backing, which is also fine by me. Pretty much agree with your assessment, @JonnyJonnyRowe. I might have gone for 6.7 or 6.9 out of 10 but 6.8 seems fair enough.

"Little Old Sydney Van Hooijdonk" then. Got stuck in a lift alone once. Thirty minutes, not scared, claustrophobic or whatever, but why is it you always need a pee desperately when in such situations? Seated on a coach at Victoria station for a three hours trip when the (grumpy) driver announced that the toilet was not available. Reason: the cleaners had not been to clean it after the last trip, and something about 'elf and safety. I'd had a couple of pints in a nearby pub too whilst waiting for the coach. The **** driver, who must have had a trained bladder, didn't make an unscheduled stop so half the bus load were desperate, including me, at the end of the trip, and we all peed in the nearest hedge with no shame when we alighted. One of the very first mixed gender toilets ... a hedge in Ramsgate. P.S. It was actually at Dumpton near the station where most got off .... an appropriate name for this event.

I'm just going to refer to a table I keep updated re. our squad. The window has to a certain extent had a focus on removing some players who fundamentally haven't been doing enough for the squad, which seems a positive. One feature now is this has left us with only 9 homegrown players over 21 on 1 January 2023 (the EFL cut-off for homegrown qualification date, with a minimum 8 required in every squad). As 4 of these are CB's unless we play 3 at the back, once any of these 9 get an injury then Wagner has to select an U21 for the squad of 20. on top of this as there are only 9 overseas players over 21, he was always destined to pick at least 2 U21's anyway, Borja Sainz and Rowe being shoe ins for those two spaces. However, my sense is that Knapper has engineered a bit more pressure on Wagner to pick U21's for the squad now, to open up progression for academy players and that has to be a good thing. We will see more U21's appearing on the bench in future as injuries to the ageing contingent are inevitable. Another feature is that when it comes to the named squad, we potentially had as many as 7 positions available for transfers in. This is as much as I have ever recorded but will be a good indicator of who the club thinks will progress from the academy when they name the 25 for their squad next week. Are there gaps - well right full back looks a particularly vulnerable position. Given the age of our natural CB's we are bound to rely on Kenny and Lungi to fill in here, but that leaves our defensive midfield looking very weak - yet again another window passes and no CDM. So with that in mind some dead wood moved on, but it still looks like we are relying on very good luck as far as injuries are concerned. Or, academy lads will play a bigger part in our squads for the rest of the season.

The boy done well.

I don’t get the hatred for Barnes. The work he puts in by putting himself about, hassling defenders and generally being a b@st@rd to play against is vastly underrated and valuable to the side as a whole

Tell me you know nothing about financial accounting and commerce without… A few things need correcting here. No, preference shares are not liabilities, they are equity, and preference dividends are not interest, they are dividends. You need distributable reserves to pay them, and we haven’t got any. In fact, our distributable reserves are negative £31.5m, so we need to make £31.5m of profit before we can pay any preference dividends. The money is (technically) there to pay them (they have been accrued as a liability) but they cannot be paid. I do not understand how they have been paid in previous years given that there haven’t been sufficient distributable reserves since 1 July 2021. But the point remains - the club aren’t paying preference dividends because if they did they would be acting illegally. Mark Attanasio putting more money into the club isn’t going to solve this problem. The MA money will be capital, not profits, not distributable reserves. So he changes nothing. Technically, the club could undergo a ‘capital reduction’ to turn the new capital into distributable reserves, but we lost £18m in 21/22 and £27m in 22/23. No director in hell would sign off on a capital reduction in those circumstances. Are we screwed? Quite possibly. The accounts do not make good reading at all. Our TV money has gone down by £54m in the last financial year, we made a loss on player trading of £19.7m, and the entirety of our deficit on reserves is being funded by Mark Attanasio’s Norwich investment vehicle. We do not have the assets to pay off his loan if he pulls it. So if we’re not screwed, it is entirely down to him. The good news is that whilst our TV money went down by £54m, our wage bill went down by a similar amount (very slightly more). But money to invest in new players? Yeah, no. Not without Mark Attanasio.

Following the sacking of Darren Moore by the Terriers DW is apparently one of the favourites to replace him. I can’t see why he would want to swP City for them so doubt this will happen.

Now that it's over, bit of a mixed bag for me but mostly positive. A tough window due to the general lack of activity, quietest window in English football in terms of quantity of moves and value of transfers for decades, and we've got obvious resource limitations and players typically pricier in January unless a club wants a bit of cash with a player 6 months from being out of contract. PROS: Syndey van Hooijdonk In - Struggled in Italy but Seria A stronger than the Championship and he seems to have a good pedigree, Holland U21 caps last year. Wary of getting too excited by a surname as a supporter of the club who once signed Paul Dalglish, and Van Wolfswinkle had senior Holland caps, but I think this one is quite exciting. Tony Springett out - Clearly not ready for this level and I don't think it would be good for him to have stepped on the pitch again at Carrow Road, hopefully he can impress in League One, but if he doesn't then at least we know that he's not one for us next season. Adam Forshaw out - Look, he's been injury prone for years, there was a player there in the past, but I don't think that player is there anymore, he's no longer at the required level, and had little prospect of an extension so just best for all parties that we move on now. The signing felt a bit desperate at the time, a bit like that time Bryan Gunn signed Paul McVeigh in League One, 4 years after his useful life and just after he'd been struggling to get into a League Two side. Jon McCracken loan - We've got a plethora of young keepers and I'm really hoping one of them will step up and make George Long redundant next year, McCracken seems to be getting a better standard of loans than the rest of them so I've got him down as my big hope for the short term if he can get some football this season. Similar with Jaden Warner I guess, him or Tomkinson can hopefully graduate to the first team squad next season. Adam Idah out - Happy with this, if he impresses at Celtic we'll either get a decent fee for him in the summer off them or somebody else or he comes back a better player with a spring in his step. I'm hoping Celtic take him on a permanent and Hooijdonk does well and it funds his acquisition, but would be just as happy if Idah comes back better equipped to make an impact. Not really any downside to this, if he struggles then another loan elsewhere next season perhaps. Keeping hold of Rowe - Huge one this, and leaves us with an outside chance of squeezing into the top 6, as long as he isn't in a hump about not getting a move. Sara and Sargent as well, but think Rowe was the most likely to leave. CONS: No defensive midfielder - It does sound like we tried, difficult window, this is a major one for Knapper to resolve in the summer after 5 years of Webber failing to recruit a permanent solution in this position. No right back - In an ideal world I think we would have brought a right back in and given Kellen Fisher a League Two loan to get more minutes under his belt, Fisher doesn't look ready and I'd have thought that we'd be trying to blood him for the squad next season, but on the other hand its probably really difficult to convince a player and their parent club to lend us a player to be a second choice right back. I think if we'd perhaps been successful in signing a defensive midfielder we could have considered Sorenson our emergency/backup right back for the rest of this season and loaned him out, so perhaps it was just the DM we needed. UNSURE Placheta out - Weird one this as I fancy him to do well in the Championship and he looked really sharp earlier this season, Wagner sang his praises, said he'd be an important player, then suddenly he was playing and struggling at left back and disappeared. I do believe that Placheta is Championship quality and that in a way we've persevered with 3 years of trying to turn him into a footballer only to ditch him at the point where he's started to look like one. In a way its a shame he didn't get a chance to try and earn a contract. Conclusion: 6.8/10

McKenna to Palace - now that would be great, I have heard he is really good.

I think that is a touch unfair. As you know I am a hopeless judge of players, and especially strikers🤩😛, but two things struck me about Idah. One that there was not one aspect of the game that he was very good at, let alone exceptional. Secondly, that he lacked the technical qualities (ball control etc) that seem now to be needed even for goalscorers, given how flexible formations are. I know next to nothing about van Hooijdonk but his pedigree - Dutch upbringing - suggests he may have the all-round abilities that Idah lacks. And he might even have one aspect of his game at which he is very good.

A couple of older classics I've been listening to - just the songwriting which tell stories.

"February till May, you say?"

I’d carry him there on my back if they were serious.

It felt similar in a way to last January where we clearly were focused on moving on some of our higher wage earners in order to reshape the squad. Moving on Foreshaw, Placheta and Hwang saves us money and doesn't really hurt us in any way. Similarly in the summer I'd imagine we'll see Dimi, Batth, Sorenson move on too. Just hoping we don't replace them with a bunch of 30+ journeymen this time.

Good chant though. I just can’t quite work out the context in which it would be used yet though.

Uhh, the only real known good business is the business we didn't do - i.e keeping hold of Sara and Rowe. It's interesting to ponder how this window would be viewed if it was exactly the same but with Webber in charge. Far more negatively I imagine. I'm also predicting that if Sydney scores the same amount of goals in similar time on the pitch as Idah, Sydney will be regarded as a success....hopefully he offers us more otherwise we've weakened our forward line.

If so it's a bloody good disguise.

I don’t get the people who think Placheta had latent talent. He’d been here three years, had a loan at another Championship club and none of it uncovered any sort of promise. He did ok in a couple of games this season to be fair but that soon tailed off and if that’s the best he could do after the time and training invested in him, meh. We won’t miss him.

Did well seeing as though there was no funds available (as per)

Takes Penalties and free kicks. Good basic weapons. Parma

Yes, you're in a cult.

I read this transfer window as treading water. I suspect the club, like most of the fans, see promotion via the play-offs as highly unlikely but theoretically possible, so they've just tried to upgrade Idah in the hope that this will tip the club into the top six. I think it shows we are going to persevere with Wagner for the rest of this season but, unless the unlikely promotion happens, he's toast in May, so there's no point getting in permanent players to fit his style. The major changes will come in the summer, in terms of the system we want to play and the manager and players we need in order to do that. It's not exciting, but it's probably sensible.

So according to the general vibe on here, every single player signed by a rival is guaranteed to improve their squad and be successful, while our offloading a few that many have criticised all season as not being up to it is a bad thing?

It was one of these. Ref taking the ****! 😆

Good, those twits had money off me for a red card that I didn't deserve about 11 years ago. Was a yellow at most.

Noticeably these so called supporters only ever post to slag off Idah. Never a positive word anywhere about the club or players. I wonder who they will pick on next?

I disagree profoundly with this. That is the exact reason the hatred is so acute. We (generally) don't work together, have mates who support the enemy, family members etc... we don't see each other, so the hatred is never softened/normalised by knowing the people. Of course there are some examples where this is not the case, but on Merseyside for example, there are siblings where one is red and the other is blue.

Gain? Immediately? None. 2022 - our operating profit excluding player trading was a loss of £392k. Our player trading loss was £23m. The £392k loss included interest payable of £3.4m. 2023 - our operating profit excluding player trading was a loss of £7.5m, including interest payments of £6m. We lost another £19.7m on player trading. Our 23 accounts don’t separately disclose interest on director loans, so no information on interest on the £36m that Attanasio has lent us, but assume a 7% interest rate if his cumulative prefs are 7%. So £2.5m interest there. But our loss was £7.5m, so even taking that out, we still lost £5m last year. Excluding player trading. So what does he get out of the purchase? That depends entirely on him turning the financial fortunes of the club around. Which means more commercial aspects of the business, us paying more as fans, making more out of the media side, perhaps more pay TV channels to get all of our games livestreamed, not just the ones on Sky. I’d be really interested to hear what he is thinking, not just as a fan but as an accountant/business adviser. But one thing is absolutely clear reading through our accounts. The financial gulf between lower Prem and upper Champ is HUGE. It’s £50m per year, which is 80% of our entire wage bill for 20/21, and 100% of it for 22/23. Football as a business has to do something about this. I think that a Prem 2 is long overdue. The Prem itself was a response to money having to be shared with the rest of the football league clubs, meaning that the premier teams got too small a share of it. We’re there again, 30 years later.

What’s with the weird James Bond style framing at the end as well? “The name’s Idah. Adam Idah”

Kenny McLean is certainly going to go down as a footballer who played for us, that’s for sure.

Love our Kenny, one of the most consistent performers. Despite changing position.

I do apologise profusely - I read this thread whilst eating my lunch, I now realise I wasn’t giving it the appropriate level of respect. Sorry all.

Yep. Look at who financed nearly all of Trump's investments for the last two decades or so...

It makes more sense if Wagner is leaving in the summer.

I’m not certain that West Ham v Millwall is ‘the’ Derby for either of these clubs. Living in north London I get the impression that Spurs v The Iron has all the elements. Of course Palace is not far from Millwall, nor is Charlton, often slightly overlooked. Arsenal derived from south London, Woolwich. I once attended (late 80s) a West Ham v M’Wall game, I lived in west London, and went in with the visitors nervously. It was post Hillsboro so although tense it wasn’t as febrile as I had expected. At the end of the game we were all matched to the tube station. I tried unsuccessfully to break Police lines and get a bus. We were all crammed into a tube train which then proceeded to go direct with stopping at any stations to my dismay. The train eventually stopped and we were all ordered off, maybe London Bridge. We all emerged out of the station, where flanks of Police were waiting, and I realised I had no choice, I had to cross the river. A copper saw me hesitating, and shouted “F off to South London”!

vɑn ˈɦoːidɔŋk

Blimey that thought ruined my Friday. 😄

Honestly, I've always found that when you stand up to bullies they run away. And away you ran. If only that was true Trump would have f***** off a while ago

I think I've watched more live Premier League football this round of matches than I have all season, probably due to them not clashing with Norwich or Lecce for a change, and I certainly picked a few good games! Justice was done in the Wolves-Utd game, both in terms of balance of play and that iffy penalty decision, but what a finish to the match that was.

We don't do bets with your lot, because you disappear and don't pay what you owe to charity when you lose.

Super Kieffer Moore 🔵⚪️😁

Yes, unfortunately I have to agree. People will only be satisfied if they have some virtual hook up to the recruitment team's office and oversee what is going on. Perhaps that should be the first thing Elon's brainchip people should work on - IP transference of BK's brain thoughts to whoever wants to pay for the privilege.

You really have to ask? It started going wrong for us and clubs like us the moment the Premier League started.

It was a complete joke wasn't it, and showed how low our fans had sunk around that time. I doubt they will have the ability to reflect on what Gibson was going through and in hindsight think about whether or not that was a stupid thing to do and show some respect now, but I hope so.

Thanks Vladimir.

37.