Wouldn't go that far, he's been a very good player at this level. Well past it now though.

Yeah, that sums up exactly my thoughts to be honest. I hope that a combination of his age, alongside our new approach means that he can find more consistency for the next five years or so. Obviously it's unrealistic for him to sustain this ridiculous purple patch, but he's so destructive that he could easily be the player that we all hoped Buttler might've been in red ball cricket. There could be a sense of making up for lost time too.

As I understand it he's very highly rated, but like a lot of youngsters at top clubs, find the Championship a much steeper learning curve than they might've first imagined. Obviously gets highlighted a lot more when you're a goalkeeper. Not sure if he would be permanent or not, but we've found that a lot of players you get loan from prem clubs would be great signings if they were on 4 year contracts, but you can really take or leave them if you just keep them for a year and let them make their mistakes. You get the odd exception like Harvey Elliott or Van Hecke last year, but just as often you get a Leighton Clarkson, Tom Lawrence or (dare I say it) Harwood-Bellis who are obviously talented but need more experience before consistently cutting it at the top of the Championship.

Happy to eat some of my words about Bairstow, his form since the ashes has been astounding. That said, we shouldn't let recency bias let us forget what the rest of his test career has been like. Forever giving his wicket away until he needed the occasional big innings to stay in the side. Being positive is fine and you expect a few soft dismissals as a result, but he simply hasn't delivered often enough for a player of his talent. Almost the first name on the team sheet now though. Long may his new found consistency continue!

I agree with your assessment of our setup at Ewood, and that commercially we've seemed second rate for some time. That said, I think we also need to be realistic about what can be achieved to the balance sheet by ticket sales, sponsorship and the like. Our entire commercial revenue in the last accounts I believe was just shy of £5million. A significant increase on that would of course be welcome, but we have to accept there is a ceiling to what this means in terms of FPP and the running of the club. Player trading, buying low and selling high, is the only game in town (bar promotion) when it comes raising the revenue of the club enough that we can spend substantially more whilst staying compliant with FPP. Obviously this means a bit of spending to accumulate, and protecting assets much better than we have done over the last few years. Slashing costs with no other strategy is a certain recipe for decline, but at there's no point pretending that FPP is an 'alleged spectre' when it's clearly not, or that we could transform our finances with a bit more effort and imagination on the commercial side.

It certainly has! Absolutely magnificent batting.

Such is the disparity in income that it's entirely possible for them to both slash their wage bill and still blow us (and most of the league) out of the water.

Sadly, we've been noncompetitive for some time when it comes to clubs with parachute payments burning holes in their pockets.

I'm sympathetic to a lot of that, if we could go back two years and make the same call again I don't think any of us would want to sign him. The fact that he's a centre-back too makes his lack of reliability all the more damaging. We are where we are, though. If someone takes us off our hands and we can give the £15k a week (or maybe more) on a more reliable player then great. But if we get into the realms of still paying a chunk of his wages just to move him on, then I think we have to be pragmatic enough to recognise that the most value we can get for our outlay is to have a good player for about half a season and make a better decision next summer. I wonder if some of the shocking recruitment we made in the Kean years has desensitised us slightly to paying off players. For clubs like ours, I think they should be real worst case scenarios for the Murphys, Orrs or Etuhus who need binning off for the good of the club. Ayala's been a frustrating signing to say the least, but he's not in that bracket.

Think it might be a bit ambitious to get a fee for him - but I agree that we might as well keep him if someone won't take on his entire contract. Twenty games of Ayala next season might end up being valuable, even if we can't rely on him to stay fit.

Yes - if I remember correctly he'd just been made bankrupt with his US based academy going belly up. Villa then offered to double his wages to £50k a year, which in his late 30s was always going to be tough to turn down.

I know what you mean - but then again I'm in my early 30s so I just put it down to getting a bit older. Rhodes stands out since relegation. Dack too I suppose. One thing I would say is that I haven't actively disliked any of our players for a while, which wasn't always the case a few years ago! Much easier to develop emotional attachment to cloggers like Smallwood and Bennett compared to the likes of Orr or Murphy.

Game of opinions, but I disagree completely. I think he's going to be the biggest loss actually. I would've agreed earlier in his career, but I thought he was very strong last season. Actually for the last couple of seasons, there's a massive difference between our win % with and without Lenihan in the team.

I really wish he was staying because it's yet another first team player that we'll now need to go out and replace. Having said that, he's comfortably the most replaceable out of the three that have left this season.

Agree completely about Reidy. People always remember the Hughes midfield as Savage & Tugay because of how well they complemented each other, but it says a lot about how good Reid's all round game was that he could play alongside them both and do just as well. One of the best genuine box-to-box midfielders we've had since the title win, albeit too briefly before the injuries took their toll.

Would still mean that we got over twice our money back from the initial outlay I suppose (assuming the £7 million figure is broadly right) but it's a large enough slice to be annoying.

Apart from the obvious - one thing that we have been absolutely appalling at over recent years is knowing how to be a trading club at this level. We've consistently managed to identify or develop players into proper assets, only then to squander their value by selling them for less than their value, or waiting until the last moment with their contracts running out. Compare that to Brentford and their success - night and day. If Brereton won't sign a new contract without us smashing our wage structure to pieces, then we don't even have a decision to make. We need to let him go to the highest bidder.

The World Cup break bookended by Burnley away and PNE at home. Potential for a brilliant or utterly depressing few weeks!

True enough, I don't really expect them to carry on a downward spiral like we did. I do think that their squad has some similar issues though. Collectively we had at least Murphy, Etuhu, Olsson, MGP, Dunny, Dann and maybe one or two more who were all comfortably mid-table standard players in the Prem only a year or two previously. A combination of age, attitude and the club being a total basket case meant that they weren't able to show their quality. Burnley aren't in such a poor state as we were, but it still remains to be seen how well their more experienced players deal with going down, as it usually goes one of two ways.

I think you're right - but then again our team was full of players with a good top-flight pedigree when we were relegated and they absolutely bombed. Some of them were perceived as good senior pros too, with experience of how tough the Championship can be. I'm not saying the same will happen to your lads this year, but we suffered badly from players approaching or past 30 who lacked either the desire or the physical capacity to compete at the levels they were once capable of. I'm looking at some of the players that you mention, and thinking too about the likes of Westwood, Cork, Gudmundsson and one or two others. It's going to be a big mental and physical challenge for them to get up for a demanding season at this point in their careers. With the unknown quantity of the new manager to factor in too, you could literally finish literally in any position from top to just above the relegation spots and it wouldn't shock me (I can't see you actually going down though, too much quality for that).

He's a good player with massive potential. Not sure he's quite at the level for a promotion chasing team just yet though, especially considering they're losing Mee, Tarkowski and seemingly now Collins too.

I think that's right. The trouble for Dolan is that the players who are both very small & lack serious pace usually need to make up for that with serious ability. He has quick feet and all the time in the world to develop - I definitely wouldn't be looking to sell unless we get a silly offer - but he still has some way to go to be able to properly compensate for his lack of size for me. Having said that I'm looking forward to seeing how he goes under JDT.

I half agree - a low centre of gravity is useful to be sure. At the moment though, his lack of size is a definite weakness in my view. He loses the ball far too easily and his size (alongside being not particularly quick after the first 10 yards or so) is the main reason for that. Dickov's a good example of a small player who ended up thriving after making the most of their stature - I'd back Dolan to be another at some point in the future, but it's the main thing that he needs to work on if he is ever to get near his potential.

I often need to remind myself how young Dolan still is. He'll probably have racked up around 100 first team appearances around the time of his 21st birthday. I worry long term about how difficult he'll find it to overcome his lack of size, but he still has big potential. I'd be much happier if this story is his agent after a new contract rather than us selling him for £2-3 million.

Big challenge for a decent number in Burnley's squad will be whether they can stay fit and hungry in a Championship season. Quite a few in their 30s now and have struggled to play much more than 20 games a season, despite only playing once a week and never doing anything in the cups. If they crack that side of things then they could obviously do well and bounce straight back, but I get the feeling the relegation has come at a bad time in a lot of their careers.