Costel Pantilimon has signed for Watford from Sunderland on a free, according to the Fail. Not sure about any of that, to be honest. Down the pecking order at the SoL, but he still wouldn't be first choice at Elton's House, plus what happened to his fee? Weird.
This guy is a prime example of being too tall. He does come across as clumsy as. Hes the wrong kind of tall.
I think he's a decent keeper. I know what you mean about his height, but there are far worse in the Premier League, for me.
Zeljko Kalac's horror show during Australia/Croatia in the 2006 World Cup is another example: Hiddink dropped Schwarzer for the match because he thought, as Kalac is 6'7" and looks halfway to being a Slender Man cosplay, he'd be a better shot stopper. Then this happened...
Neuer and De Gea are 6'4", though. I don't think that extra height's going to make that much difference.
That's true P. As HB says, it's that slender man stance, you know when someone looks like that then they are the wrong tall. Those two look solid, rather like myself.
There's a difference of 0.01 seconds between falling from 6'7 to the ground and falling from 6'4 to the ground. I did the maths. Gravity's a predictable bitch.
Hopefully, after having their poaching attempt shot down, Poch was helpful enough to show Man Utd's agents where they could go please log in to view this image
Unless one of the mods has posted on Notso and I missed it, then I believe it was me who posted the last update on him. I can confirm he continues to be well but sadly has no intention of returning whilst a certain poster remains on here and whilst a certain mod remains on here. If what Notso says happened, really did happen, then I fully understand why he left.
Berahino wasn't even on the bench tonight. Then again, is that newsworthy? The last time he started a match the Trick or Treaters were out and about.
He's their joint top scorer in the league despite hardly getting a kick. Whatever Pulis says about him not playing well enough he's a damn site better than Rondon, at this point they're just harming themselves, letting his contract run down, losing money and wasting a good player.
This excerpt is part of a rare Jeremy Peace interview from October 2014: “It’s brilliant for us having somebody coming through our Academy into the first team. The others can see it. We had the big example of Izzy Brown who went to Chelsea. Izzy played against Wigan when he was 16 for us, and we lost him the following year; he just didn’t come back for pre-season. It’s the carrot dangled in front of the parents. Izzy would have been in the first team, Premier League. Now he’s in the Under-21s at Chelsea, I think doing quite well. Because they (Chelsea) need to buy ready-made players it’s obviously more difficult to get into their first team. It will be interesting to see who ends up furthest (Berahino or Brown).” Albion briefly considered closing their Academy. “With EPPP we’ve done what we were asked to. We’re a Category One club, we’ve invested in it. Gross expense on it is £3m a year and we have a subsidy of £800,000. So £2.2m net. Up until last season you’ve had Liverpool knocking on our door saying: ‘We’d like Jerome Sinclair please, we’d like Yan Dhanda please. How much? £200,000? There you go.’ Hang on a second. We are spending £2.2m net and these players are going for £200,000 plus add-ons if they make it into the first team. The add-ons aren’t good enough. “You should be getting a lot more for the player and then clubs have to take a real risk on it, rather than ‘if we buy five and one comes good, it’s only cost us £1m and he could be worth £10m’. We are training them up for somebody else to take them. We said: ‘What can we do? Can we completely disband it?’ That’s too radical. We are regarded as the No 1 in the area in the Midlands in terms of the Academy right now.’’ This guy Peace owns 88% of WBA and, effectively, is answerable to nobody in his running of it. He was never going to accept our offer of £5m up-front plus add-ons. If we didn't know this, then we bloody well should have known. Given his published views on low front-loaded offers for players, we would have been better off trying to swap Fazio for Messi plus add-ons. Maybe we did know and it was one of our heroic but always doomed late 'attempts' to land a player to please the manager? See Moutinho (whose third party ownership issues killed any chance of us signing him). Maybe Levy just doesn't like Peace and did it to upset the bloke? Whatever, I can't see us signing Berahino and I wonder who is being unreasonable/unrealistic between Peace and Levy? Grrrrr!!!
I had no idea about any of this, I certainly don't recall any of it at the time. He obviously feels strongly about it. I just think it's sad. There is nothing in his last posts that suggest it, no arguments with anyone. I don't recall him being such a sensitive flower. http://www.not606.com/members/notsosmartspur.1009453/
"I had no idea about any of this, I certainly don't recall any of it at the time. He obviously feels strongly about it. I just think it's sad. There is nothing in his last posts that suggest it, no arguments with anyone. I don't recall him being such a sensitive flower." I suspect it is about a comment he made about someone in a piccie posted resembling his daughter. The mods appear to have blown away whatever replies were made on that topic (he was less than pleased with my comment that if his daughter resembled that, tell her to eat more - I hate anorexic-looking woman and the entire social culture that pressures them down that path) .
I'm not so sure Brian. As was widely commented at the time, very few teams are in a position to fork out over £20m in one go and will almost always look to pay in installments. In our case, I believe we were eventually offering (half an hour before the window closed, a favourite strategy of Levy that has yielded one success story in the past 15 years ) close to £25m in installments of 5-6m per annum over 4-5 years. That is a completely normal approach to a transfer. Even Real Madrid, propped up by the Spanish banks, had to pay Modric's fee over a similar period of time; and I doubt they coughed up Bale's fee in one go. No doubt they somehow wangled an agreement whereby they would indemnify us for Bale with shares in Spanish National Rail. I was always of the opinion that Peace's unpeaceful stance was to turn Berahino into Willian mrk II. He was simply using us as bait in the hope that one of the big fish would bite with a bigger bid. The fact that the player is now being linked with Chelsea seems to confirm that. Not that they'll necessarily sign him, but Peace certainly hopes that they will.
He'd better hope The Chavs stump up, or its all going to blow up in his face! If that happens, Levy will have no mercy and screw him to the floor!
If it was payment in instalments, then fair enough it's the way these things are done. However, Levy wanted to pay a small sum up front (£5m is widely referenced) with the rest of a possible maximum £23m based upon appearances, goals, international caps, Champions' League qualification, etc. Berahino has a history of being a bit flaky and the suggested terms were never, ever going to be acceptable. Peace is known to be a very tough nut and if ever a deal was doomed to fail, it was this one.So doomed was it, that I can't take it to be a serious attempt at all.
