Souey is playing it clever and offering to take over his contract for a free transfer rather than a bid of around 750k.

That wouldn't be clever at all, paying Matteo a few million every year for 3-4 years is far more than paying 750k and getting Leeds to contribute towards his high wages.

I'm sure the scouts picked up on Nissa, and what a waste of space he has been.

What do you expect when he plays one match every season?

Johansson hasn't had a decent chance to stake a claim in the team, we seem to want a sound central pairing but aren't willing to give the pair 10-15 games to sort out the partnership.

Wes Brown came back from a serious injury earlier this year and was genuinely rubbish but Sir Alex stuck with him for a long spell and towards the end he showed why before his injury he was one of the most promising centre halves England has at the moment.

Nisse has been a centre half that was highly rated when he was young and at Bayern Munich but how do you expect a player to improve when you don't get to play and the only way you improve is by making mistakes and learning from them, it seems that our club we seem to have a very short sighted strategy by getting older players and by chopping the squad if they make a mistake during the match.

If anyone else was at the ground around 1100ish he turned up in a Land Rover with 2 other people !

Viduka and Milner by any chance?

No, that's Mulder and Scully.

Amoruso, Matteo, Short, Johansson, Fitzgerald, Todd

I presume that's the order Souness sees them.

The positives:

Matteo's leadership qualities, we need more leaders on the pitch

defensive qualities, well he's better than what we have at the moment, when fit.

Price, if the fee is under a million, I guess it'll be a good move.

Negatives:

Is he fit enough to play a full season? We already have Amoruso and Short two key defenders who seem to get injured every other month.

That's just a quick summary, however my main reservations is our transfer policy this summer

*Age, we seem to be bringing in more older players when we clearly need to bring down the average age.

*Transfer targets, what's happened to our scouting? The only player we seem to have looked at this year is Pedersen. Why haven't we been scouting for a central defender, midfielder and striker aswell. I sincerely hope that Souness' hasn't lost his faith in his scouts. I would hate to think that next summer, we would be going after some West Brom, Norwich or Crystal Palace senior player to bolster our squad. I know good players don't come cheap but that's why we need to extend our scouting to be able to catch hold of players with potential before their market value rises.

I guess especially for juniors at that price being so low is to make it affordable for youngsters to come along and get to watch Rovers at an early age. If they like it then there’s more of a chance that they’ll be prepared to pay slightly more expensive prices as they get older.

Perhaps I should stress that for under 8's it's completely FREE the still extremely cheap junior price of £70 - £75 is for 8-15 year olds.

In the long term we need to keep these offers and try and hoover up all the school age support from Blackpool/ Burnley/ Preston/North Lancs /anywhere else etc.

The key word in your post is STRESS, Rev.

I can guarantee that only a minority of Rovers fans (and none of anyone who lives in the area but doesn't goto footy because it thinks its expensive) will know about it. The club has one of the cheapest STs in the League but only few know about it. Just like the rest of the good news, it only reaches the first few rows of Rovers fans- which is a shame because if more knew about it, we would get more fans following Rovers.

Who was it that said he was the foreign David Beckham   

probably himself

I always thought that was the media dubbing him the Norwegian Beckham because he was voted the most sexiest footballer or sportsman or something like that in Norway.

dont need any more defensive midfielders, already have a lot of them. 

like who?

Flitcroft - Emerton and Reid

Yes, I know Flitcroft but Emerton and Reid??????

The only player in our squad that can be called a defensive midfielder is Flitcroft.

dont need any more defensive midfielders, already have a lot of them. 

like who?

Point is, our fans don't seem to have realised that we cannot compete for the biggest players any more. We're a small club who's fans have a big club mentality.

Bingo!

We need to stop having this huge pressure by claiming that he NEEDS to come in and perform from day 1.

What a load of old tosh.

All eleven players whoever they are, in whatever position, NEED to come in and perform from day 1 next season. There's no room for any passengers at this level unfortunately.

And what if they don't perform from the first day? Get rid of them because we can't afford any passengers?

If that's the case, we would never had seen Henry, Pires, Okocha and a list of other foreign players if we adapted your view on new foreign players. The only recent foreign player I've seen come in and play well from the start is Nistlerooy.

If anything clubs like ourselves need to be more patient with new players because we can offer them a chance to play regularly and without the pressures of Man Utd or Chelsea where they need to win every single match or they wont play. That should be one of pros for a young player to join our club.

Thank god you aren't our manager.

We need to stop having this huge pressure by claiming that he NEEDS to come in and perform from day 1.

But, we can't afford to start the season off without a L.M. Along with problems elsewhere in the team, not having any balance in the side cost us dearly.

We can't approach the new season in no better shape than last.

I'm not disagreeing with the fact that we need a left midfielder or that we have suffered from an imbalanced team for years, infact I've been going on for seasons saying that we had no balance, although previously I felt it was the lack of gritty players it may be the opposite now.

Lets not have too high expectations of him scoring a goal and setting up two goals and Rovers slaughtering Crystal Palace 5-1 on the opening day.

What I mean is that he's going to need a few matches to get settled and let's give him that, it's already tough for anyone to come into our problem area, lets not make it any harder for him.

It's official

Signs on a 2-yr-deal

IMO we need a player who can go straight into our starting XI and perform from day one, and I'm not to sure Gamst Pedersen can do that..

It's such a shame, because with that pressure it'll be a steep hill for anyone we sign this summer. Duff is history, he wasn't the finish article when he started and if he had this pressure on him to perform from day 1, chances are he wouldn't have got this far. We need to give whoever comes in whether he is 22 or 32, the chance to aclimatise to the team, surroundings, the Premiership oh and our fans (I'm sure Emerton can fill him on that one.)

We need to stop having this huge pressure by claiming that he NEEDS to come in and perform from day 1.

This whole Pedersen saga is starting to worry me. It's not the question about him adapting, it's more that the longer this transaction goes on the more matches he plays for his club which may mean that he won't have a decent break before pre-season (that is if we EVEN manage to get him prior to that) and with the injuries our players seem to suffer, it would be devastating to see him join Rovers, have a decent pre-season then season starts only for him to break down in September leaving us back in square one.

Fair enough Herbegeeh, you've no doubt have seen him play, I haven't.

It would be lovely for us to sign him, and for him to be the dog's bojangles, I still have this nagging doubt, based on instinct I suppose, backed by our recent foray's into the foreign market.

As for Souey watching him, well we had Baggio on trial at Ewood and still got it wrong.

Find someone with a known pedigree I say.

A slight contradiction there, Baggio is/was known pedigree. The only problem was that he was played out of position as a striker. He's been one of the continents best defensive midfielders for years and he comes on playing as a striker, only happens at Rovers. The only reason, imo that he was brought in was for his experience playing in Europe and we needed that in the UEFA Cup, unfortunately that didn't last for long.

However, I do agree on the rest. It's common for clubs or in any healthy business brokering to reject the first offer but if they continue to reject and start coming up with other clauses then I suggest we leave them. They want the money and if we just cool on him, their attitude willingness might change.

Just the prem home games.

It's hard to judge Pedersen from only seeing 45 minutes in a surprisingly poor Norwegian side. What was slightly worrying was that he seemed to drift around the pitch and didn't spend much time playing like a winger. Whether this is a tactic employed by the national team or just the way Pedersen plays I don't know but the closest comparison I could make was that he was like a slightly taller, left sided David Thompson. Hopefully with Souness having been to a number of games to watch him, he'll know better as to how he plays.

I only watched up to half time as Pedersen was taken off but in the first half Martin Andresen did nothing to suggest that he should be bought/ have been bought as he was pretty average, as was Hoseth who we had been vaguely linked with.

Pedersen may be worth a go as he is still young but I'd leave the other two well alone.

I watched the first half - definitely one of the most boring halves I've ever watched. Anyway as Pedersen, he didn't do much in the first 45 but then neither did anyone on the pitch, but like the poster above, I was puzzled by his positioning. He was positioned more like a striker than a left winger. He was always high up on the pitch and on several occassions drifted into the middle and went for the same ball the striker would. This gave Riise the chance to move forward as much as possible and he took on what was Pedersens workload (e.g. crossing and attacking the left flank)

Anyway I don't think too many players would have done much more against a very defensive minded Welsh team and he's still young and has the chance to improve, even Duff had off games.

Think it would make it better if the majority of Rovers fans stayed in the same hotel rather than scattered all over the city.

Had a look at hotels and found one at £28.50 per night, but it is 1km from the city centre, and those who went to Ankara know about staying in Hotels far away from the centre.

1km isn't far tho.

I agree, roversismylife.

What it clearly shows along with other stories this season is that loyalty doesn't exist at most levels in football. Players will move whenever and to wherever if they so wish despite having a contract, managers will do the same and management have also shown that they will shift players and managers if they so wish.

They only loyal people in football these days are the fans, or atleast the majority of them.

It's sickening when players or managers or even board level talk about ambition. Why is it ambitious to goto somewhere like Man Utd or Chelsea. That's not ambitious, that's taking the easy route to winning throphys. Ambition is taking a team like Rovers and winning the League or Cup title. That's ambitious.

Defoe is a natural goal scorer you can tell that buy watching him.

he reminds me of Ian Wright.

I agree smith has determination but skill I disagree.

its only because of his determination that he gets all the recognition

I agree with all your points there.

Smith is bit like Savage although I do think Smith has abit more skill than Savage. They both don't give up and it will be interesting to see where Smith plays for United - either behind Van Nistlerooy or Saha or in midfield like he did for a short period at Leeds.

I don't think many Rovers' fans will be changing their allegience just because Burnley have stuffed a leaflet through their doors.

I don't suppose it will work the other way either.

No, but many of those that might percieve going to footy is expensive ala Chelsea prices might realise that it doesn't cost that much to go watch Rovers play in the same league.

There's so much ignorance among people out in this great land about going to football and that's why they don't goto footy. One way of educating these people is by posting leaflets to as many people as possible to let them know about the "low cost" in watching Premiership footy.

According to ITV text- we're playing Bury away, although judging by the kick off time it might be the reserves.

Mon July 19th - 11.30

- they weren't "name" enough.

Abit like some of the Rovers supporters.

I think it's more that the LET published a story that was just a rumour in a few Sunday tabloid talk section and when the news got to Norway, the club feared that it might put off other clubs putting a bid and decided to come out and say that no ones put in a bid.

From what the Tromsoe chairman said, it seems that they are waiting to cash on him. £1-2m would be alot of money for a club of it's size.

who did they ring

Ghostbusters?

I ain't afraid a no ghost