Substitute "JRC" for "Vale" and that comment could have been on here this time last year - and probably was.

He was on loan last season at Scunthorpe - admittedly a poor side - but made little impression.

You know that's not true - so why say it ?

Getting it right - but the poster I responded to was blaming the referee. He was not to blame.

No - a statement of fact.

The ref had 5 or 6 players between him and Barnes - he had no chance of seeing it.

He took over Sunderland at the end of August when they had only played 5 games whereas he took over Rovers when there were only 15 games left. What, as mentioned on another thread, I think is known as Mowbray Derangement Syndrome. To describe 5 games in as "mid season" must be an acute state of that condition.

Superb finish by Sammy

Coventry back in front.

Reading equalise at Coventry

Doesn't VAR only operate to call a red card but not a yellow, second or otherwise ?

Sure - but clearly it was very difficult for those at the club charged with the responsibility for taking those sorts of decisions to know whether or not to offer the player another contract.

You would have taken a million then ?

Even though he "struggled with the basics" ? There are a number of other posters - I won't say who so as to spare their blushes - who thought he was not up to much. It wasn't unreasonable in the summer of 2021 to think that signing him was a mistake because he had delivered relatively little. But a new contract then ? At what sort of salary ?

Yet the fans on this forum are demanding that at least one particular player should not be in the starting line up, and that another player should be, even though the experts who are employed to make these decisions seem to think otherwise.

The point I am really making is that so much of the discussion about this player - and some others as well - is people being wise after the event but then berating people employed at the club because they weren't clairvoyants. Things just aren't as simple as they can be represented on this messageboard.

One of those posters would have been you. On page 192 of this thread - in June 2021 - you said Brereton was struggling with the basics.

You're assuming that Brereton would have agreed to the move to whoever - rather than wait a year for his contract to run down and be able to move without a transfer fee but presumably a big signing on fee. Who knows if the owners would have made the transfer fee available for new signings.

If you look at the Grand Old team forum their fans are not optimistic about what sort of money they could recoup on sales. Pickford would go for a fair few quid but they are saddled with a large number of under achieving players and the big question is whether there are clauses in their contracts that reduce their wages if they are relegated.

A million at best back then.

If Brereton had been sold with 2 years left that would have been the summer of 2021. What sort of transfer fee do you think that a player who at that stage had scored 9 goals in 80 Championship appearances would go for ?

After Newcastle had their cut we got £10m for Armstrong. Brentford were in the Championship for 7 seasons before they got promoted. I'm not defending the way Venkys have run the club - but I don't agree with the use of the word "underfunding" given the amount they've spent.

They spent £4m- £4.5m on bringing in Brittain,Hyam and Szmodics this year who replaced Nyambe,Lenihan and Rothwell. I would have thought that with players coming through our academy signing 3 players a year was a reasonable rate of recruitment. The idea that you will lose lots of money if you don't spend even more money signing players went out with Mel Morris and is the sort of thinking that the forthcoming new system of regulation in football is designed to prevent.

"Years of underfunding"? I hold no candle for the owners who have made many bad decisions but they have been losing £15m - £20m a year for many years.

Weren't they involved with a film studio that went wrong ?