Icecream Snow

Brighton had the shortest squad in the premiership though (edit - I'm not saying he was a bad appointment, Brighton have a great setup, and if their set piece stats aren't great, then they didn't have the tallest squad to start with)

Yeah, we got hit at work and had a four hour outage, believed to be Crowdstrike disrupting the Microsoft Cloud.

Decent record though

Labour win Hendon by just 15 votes

Would have though Jeremy Hunt was the sensible choice, but they're all ghouls.

The Farage love-in is pretty annoying. He was parachuted into a constituency that Labour were never going to win (they polled 16%) and Reform has four seats so far. First past the post isn't great, but this chancer's party polling 15% of the vote nationally, despite an absence of any policies, just highlights why the alternatives wouldn't be any better.

I'm watching Ed Balls roast Nicola Sturgeon's logic on ITV 😄

There's a lot of moving parts though. We've just appointed a new manager who is going to want to look at the squad himself, and he's been specifically appointed because his work in developing young players. So both Knapper and Thorup are going to want to see the likes of Abu Kamara, Brad Hills and Ken Aboh in pre-season to see if they're ready for first team football in the Championship or if they need another loan. Then there may or may not be departures and we have a big squad. So aside from the obvious need for a left-back, we may need to reduce the size of the squad before we can bring anyone else in.

Rishi Sunak's a school year younger than me, but I don't remember Sky being much of a big deal. I remember the kids from the council houses (though I didn't know that at the time) trying to make a big deal of them having Sky though.

It's even smaller than that - it would have been £28m if they got promoted this year, currently it's just a guaranteed £10m. From the Athletic Perhaps the best evidence of this narrowly avoided crash can be seen in the return on investment Lai is getting. The Chinese businessman paid about £200million for what was a Premier League club in 2016. Patel is paying him only £10m guaranteed – £2.5m on completion, £2.5m in August and £5.5m in August 2025. There is the possibility of bonus payments if West Brom are promoted. Go up this season, and they are currently fifth, and Patel will pay Lai an extra £18m. Promotion next season would trigger a £10m payment, £5m the following season and £2m if West Brom have to wait until the 2026-27 season. The real benefit to Lai is that funding West Brom’s annual losses and repaying their debts are now somebody else’s problems.

It's weird to think how we got to this point. I can remember watching Keir Starmer's early PMQs versus Boris Johnson in Jan/Feb 2020 and thinking that whilst a bit wooden, he seemed level headed and was asking some intelligent questions that Boris typically avoided. I remember thinking that the whole thing seemed a bit pointless, Boris had won with a majority of 80 seats, he'd purged the Tory moderates and even Sajid Javid was forced to step down as chancellor to be replaced with the more compliant Business Secretary Rishi Sunak (whatever happened to him?). At the time Boris had this vice-like grip over the party and looked set for a comfortable five years in power, if not more. Then the pandemic hit 😛 But even factoring in the pandemic, it's staggering how hard Boris threw.

I did wonder if Summerville and Rutter have similar clauses.

Yeah BBC confirming the "not chelsea" story https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/ce99vjg3r86o

Interesting because John Percy is usually right, very well informed journalist.

Even if Leeds sack Farke, I struggle to see anyone doing any better. My understanding is that their former sporting director Victor Orta signed many players on long term contracts but clauses were added that if Leeds were in the Championship, the players could go out on loan if a fee was met (eg Jack Harrison, Sinsterra, Aaronsen etc ) Leeds ended the season with 11+ players out of loan.

The only way I see Kieran McKenna signing a new Ipswich contract is if there's no management offers from elsewhere. From the paper talk it sounds like he's very much a man in demand, but we'll see if that translates into any concrete job offers.

I don't normally take notice of speculation, but for the BBC to run that story, it's clear that Kieran McKenna (or his agent on his behalf) is angling to change jobs very soon.

desperate to get out quickly more like 😛 McKenna – who is contracted to Ipswich until 2027 - is ambitious and is understood to be keen to take the next step in his career.

Extending Sorenson and Lima going are the only surprises to me. I know there was talk that Lima was lightweight, but I thought they was noise from the club that we were keen on signing him full time.

Crowd trouble after the game.

Not sure if it would be Cuesta as that would be a bit of a coup, but it'll be another young, hungry, progressive manager in the Worthington/Farke/Lambert/Neil mould.

Jesse Marsch at 20/1 seems weird given that he was named Canada boss three days ago 😛

Laura Toryberg in fine form

That hit's hard. I had a phone call yesterday to say someone I know had died. People had seen him on Sunday and then his mum found him dead on the Monday. I wouldn't say that we were really close, but it still hit me for six. It's why initiatives like this are really important.

Well that went well 😛 The chief executive of Birmingham City says John Eustace was sacked as the club's head coach after it "became clear that there was a misalignment with the leadership of the Club". In an open letter to supporters, Garry Cook said that Eustace had "clear ambitions and goals for the season", but "following a series of meetings over a number of months" it was apparent that the ambitions of the owners and the coach did not match. He said, "when this happens, the best thing to do is to part company". Eustace was sacked as head coach of the club on Monday after 15 months in charge, and despite the side sitting 6th in Championship. Eustace's team had just beaten West Bromwich Albion 3-1 at St Andrews in a Midlands derby too.