He was signed as a development player before the severe budget cuts happened. If Venky's had put the restrictions in place in April he probably wouldn't have been signed. The 4 year contract was offered as they expected him to take 12 months to sort out his fitness and develop him to championship standard, the following season we would benefit and in 2 years sold on with a profit and 2 years remaining on his contract.

The £1.8m agent fees is a strange one, spend on agents is published by the EFL and for the last few seasons it's been around £500k a season and I can't see it being anywhere near that this season. So I am starting to think maybe agent fees includes other types of agents besides football ones such as people who have introduced Venture Capitalists for the training ground loan or funding advice /legal advice we are likely to need. One thing we can say is once the Indian Government sinks their teeth into this they will investigate every single payment the Venky's have sent to the UK and how it has been spent. It is going to be a very long and drawn out affair to say the least

Apologies fat fingers, should be TK.

With the sudden wage budget reduction and the fact that after Ayala and Dack had left, TM was our highest paid player, we can comfortably say he was going no matter what after June. It's debatable if things hadn't been cut would he have stayed?

I think we'll need the suitors to cover costs by January. It looks clear Venky's aren't likely to be sending through any more cash this year so we'll have to find a good chunk of change in January.

I would love to see what a proper 4-4-2 team could do with 2 fast wingers and 2 good Forwards who are not afraid to attack the ball, against today's sides. We seem to be losing a lot out of the game especially with young player development with these new rigid system approaches. I am sure a Duff, Gillespie, Ripley etc would never come through now, they would have the individuality drilled out of them. I don't even think we produce good quality strikers anymore through youth teams.

I think he'll be tasked with raising £10m in January to cover this year's running costs till end of May. So we can expect A. Wharton to be sold to probably Newcastle in January. Next summer will be interesting as we won't have anyone else to really sell. The recruitment team are really going to be up against it.

I would be good to turn a side over for a change, especially to improve our goal difference for later in the season.

It's probably a good job he was quick out of the blocks with 3 early signings or otherwise the summer would have been terrible. He must have enjoyed that call in mid June making him save £60k a week in wages and generate £5m in transfer income while also trying to fill out the numbers in the squad. We can complain about the players we have signed but generally there probably weren't many other options within our constraints.

Although we can probably add we know the £6m fine equals the amount our budget seems to have reduced by this season.

In reality we've got what we've paid for. It looks like we've generated £4m net in transfer fees and are saving somewhere in the the region of £50-60k a week in wages. So from a Venky's perspective they only need to inject £8-10m into the club this season. After generating those funds we could have easily afforded several good forwards. The problem of not being able to invest any of the savings is that we have gambled on probably our 10-12th choice options and need them to hit the ground running just to get numbers into the squad. At the beginning of the summer, GB and JDT had agreed on the players to go for and had brought 3 pretty good players in and were working on several forwards until the plug was pulled. Next summer they will most probably sell A. Wharton and allow £2m to be spent on players and not have to inject any funds into the club. What an opportunity Venky's have squandered.

Did he mention anything about all the rumours and how false they are? More to the point did he even know about the rumours?

I wouldn't object to a manager swap and appoint Ruud for ourselves really.

Apart from being on record saying he had to talk Venky's out of funding a back to back promotion push and instead go for consolidation and continual improvement. With Venky's it's all about interest and excitement with them. After the league 1 promotion they were interested and willing to bankroll a promotion push. After that first season back they have lost interest again. I am hoping JDT and Greg have managed to get them interested again so we'll have a reasonable budget this summer.

I see he is now saying it's never too early to gain promotion to the premier league, which is surprising after saying he had to calm Venky's down from going for a double promotion as we would be promoted too early in the journey. As we all know Venky's then lost interest.

At a normal club yes, but at Ewood, apart from the club shop, everything has been outsourced. We receive a set fixed amount per season so it doesn't have any impact on our income if 2,000 people turn up or 30,000.

A) I don't think they have fallen out, I think both are incredibly frustrated with how Jan turned out. he is very ambitious so it's a possibility. I think he knows we have a great academy and a lot of potential. Most of our players have now been tied down to new contracts by Greg (which I don't think would have happened with Waggot and his home grown wage limits), so it's up to JDT.

At the end of the day, everything is a symptom of the owners. More clued up and interested owners wouldn't have Waggot or Silvester working for the club. They also would have moved heaven and earth to get a striker in in Jan (increasing budget to do it if needed) and probably would have sorted O'Brien without any issues as well. A lot of the time we don't move quickly for players due to budget limitations.

Club secretary and he won't be fired.

The third time in past 4 years. We just know about it this time.

He shouldn't really be allowed to play until SU have settled the debts for him or he should be going back to his former club.

We wouldn't have got any cash, instead of Venky's injecting £20m they would have done £8m instead. You'd have just had a few less players. A normal club you'd be correct, with usit doesn't matter, logic goes out the window. If you look at Brentford, so long as they made a profit each player was sold once an offer was made and cash reinvested and I hope this is what we start happening. We used to do this all the time under the trust but the comments used to be why are we selling and not keeping the player etc.

Sadly GB can't do anything. Any change will happen at the end of year review meeting with Venky. Silvesters close relationship with the Devil and knowing where all of the skeletons are means he's pretty much untouchable. So in reality what are we expecting to happen?

Forest were not sued last for damages last year for a similar occurrence so they won't this year. Also if they did, I would expect our lawyers would go back further in the day and say why did O'Brien complete his training till 1pm when we had agreed the loan between all parties by 11am? Surely as it was deadline day he should have left training immediately and headed up to Brockhall and sorted everything out. In essence those couple of hours training resulted in the transfer not being completed in time.

There is normally a clause stating the loan agreement is enacted upon league registration and is null and void without league approval. So there will be no claims from Forest. If that was the case multiple claims would be going through court now including against Forest last year for missing the deadline by 7 seconds. However I still do not understand why the EFL are not using the Premier League system where you have 2 hours to submit final paperwork once the deadline has passed so long as the deal sheet has been submitted by 11pm deadline. Looking at the timeline and the missing hour, we can safely assume Waggot/Pasha had to be consulted for approval which being towards the end of the Birmingham match they would have been busy being entertained by the Birmingham hierarchy so would have been difficult to contact. Also I have no idea why Silvester wasn't at Brockhall with the players and Greg, as they were all busy doing interviews and marketing material. So would have been pretty easy to sort the last few things out.