Was just my personal opinion to be fair. Some might find value in being told that "things are bright" but being given nothing constructive, nothing tangible or nothing specific beyond that to discuss and debate on an internet messageboard, it also sparks this carrot dangling sort of toing and froing. But thats just my opinion, others will differ. I couldn't possibly or agree or disagree with you because you haven't really said anything.

But it adds absolutely nothing when absolutely no details whatsoever can be shared. Surely just update if and when the actual details can be shared, otherwise nothing possibly can be discussed.

Of course we should look to become as self sustainable as possible. The thing you repeatedly fail to grasp is that allowing a series of key assets with financial value to leave on frees rather than for frees flies very much in the face of that. Plus the players would need replacing which would cost money anyway, if we became solely reliant on academy graduates to fill every gap, eventually we will not be competitive and succumb to relegation. Even if 3 contracts were funded by the sale of the 4th player of those running down their deals, that would be fine. Not renewing these contracts is illogical in every way, including financial. Trying to save pennies in the short term is just removing the potential for much bigger fees in the long run. A bit of needless and potentially premature smugness at the bottom, I never said that Pickering wouldn't be a good signing, like you I had never seen him play last season. His first few games, I was far from on my own in thinking that he looked shaky, thankfully he now looks to be settling in nicely. Let's not get too giddy about Ayala's fitness too soon, he was struggling at the end on Saturday, his quality is undoubted but we need more than 9 appearances to suggest that the fitness work has been remarkable, perhaps the key has simply been getting a pre season in. And Brereton in his first 3 seasons couldn't have looked any less of a goalscorer so his 7 goals have been somewhat against any previous evidence. The window was crap, we failed to fill our main vacancy

Is the "speculation bandwagon" helped by posts suggesting that you know lots of things that no one else could possibly understand but that you can't elaborate on it?

The point about player morale is totally seperate to FFP, and I would personally say a more valid and likely one, and something that indeed has been publically mentioned. That being said, I am not suggesting that we should break the wage structure to get any of them. Brereton and Lenihan along with Dack you would suggest should be possibly our highest earners, as our main attacker and our captain respectively. Whilst with Rothwell and Nyambe, I would (this is an assumption) presume are not amongst our highest earners, with the former on the initial deal he signed after leaving League 1 Oxford to join as a squad player, and Nyambe last signing a deal before establishing and massively developing himself. I would suggest that we could give them a decent rise as important first teamers without smashing the wage ceiling. Plus think of the replacement cost.

That to me is the ultimate unfounded comparison, and a totally unsubstantiated one. Offering a miniscule fraction of the proceeds of a major sale to improve contract offers to tie down other valuable assets who can potentially then be sold at some point does not put us at risk of becoming like any of those clubs. We could offer 3 of them new deals and sell one in January. If they all go for free, we will need to replace them all with freebies who will themselves require competitive wages, most likely will not carry comparitive value and will also of course expect signing on fees. FFP my arse.

Weve just sold a 15m player, we can offer 3 or 4 players a few extra grand a week, 2k a week would be 100k a year. Even if it meant sacrificing one in January to keep the other 3. Financially, letting all of them leave for frees would be the most counterproductive option. FFP is a convenient excuse and one of which there has been no public mention even by Steve excuses Waggott of in regards to these new deals.

They just dont have enough quality. They had 3 English starters at the weekend and a couple of Scots. Brentford had 3 Englishmen and they did well, Southampton had 7 and they have yet to win a game. Wont find much correlation. Having heart doesnt have to come from English players, there is no reason to think that foreign players care any less.

Clearly not enough to entice any of these players to actually sign these contracts. Strike whilst the iron is hot and we are doing well, money is and always will be the driving factor behind such issues so there is no excuse. Just a continious spouting of how bad Covid is in India whilst half of our team runs down their contract and leaves us in the sheet. But at least Balaji "wrote" a letter saying that he cares. I dont see how the window can be seen as anything other than a failure, we havent improved the starting 11. We publically announced that we wanted a striker, we didnt get one. We signed 5 players and judging now, Clarkson looks like a little boy lost when he comes on, Van Hecke will be injured until the point when he will be one of 5 centre backs, so what was the point? Poveda has looked really poor in his only 2 starts, Edun is just a squad filler and Khadra looks the most promising of the 5 and he himself is a squad player. I hope at least some of the 5 grow into things and make significant contributions but we have just added to the numbers, it seems at this present moment. The improvement has come through players that were already contracted here. Ayala is (temporarily at least) fit and has improved our defence, as has Pickering who signed in January. Brereton has also matched last seasons goal tally and Travis is back fit and in much better shape. Dolan has also showed flashes in some games. These all have benefitted the team but none of them reflect the transfer window.

I still think that we will not sustain the early start, that the team will likely be broken up due to the owners negligence, and that the summer window was an unsuccessful one, 100%. But the manager deserves praise for the first 9 games, can't just put it down to luck.

Touched on the Norwich situation in my previous post, but they seem very strange. Their team is worse than last season, you wonder if they need to take a step back and perhaps make a change or 2, either in the managerial position, the director of football or indeed both. Compare to Watford, no kids on loan from clubs in the same league, reasonable but not irresponsible transfer fees, no big sales, bits of experience (on cheap/free deals) in Sissoko, King and Rose, and someone in Emmanuel Dennis who has hit the ground running. Or Brentford, a similar story, Ajer from Celtic catching the eye, and both are very competitive in this league. Norwich weren't last time and they aren't this time, and considering that they were the winners of the Championship, something has gone wrong again, 16 losses on the bounce in the Premier League is shocking.

Have there been "so many seasons" with possession based shite? The first 2 full seasons, we were a very direct side, whether that involved an element of pragmatism that moved away from Mowbray's ideals is speculative and indeed irrelevant, we certainly could not be described as a possession based team. Even in the second season in the Championship, although we had Downing, Holtby and Adarabioyo, I wouldn't say that we focused too much on possession, it was only really last season when we tried and totally failed to control games based on flawed logic. The Venus theory seems like a bit of a jump to me. Surely the most logical reason would be a mixture of realising that what he had tried to implement didn't work, and also a natural pragmatism due to the inferior resources and squad available to him?

Agreed, it all is a little muddled up. It is crazy how they can be so good at Championship level yet so poor at Premier League level, to such a degree. Their summer recruitment has been totally bizarre. 4 loans would as we know as Rovers fans be considered a lot in the Championship, but as a Premier League club it seems totally unnecessary, you don't want to be allowing teams from the same leagues to lend you their kids and Williams and Gilmour seem to have struggled, the former made a terrible mistake v Watford. The one aspect that didn't sit right and would have had me fuming if I supported Norwich was the attitude coming from the top that was seemingly allowed to pass down via the manager the last time they went up. A club should always be prudent and financially sensible, but equally it shouldn't publically announce that it expects relegation. You give it a proper go, fighting for survival until its mathematically impossible, and you always have that mindset, whilst those at the top can arrange the finances for a worst case scenario without letting that sort of talk leave the boardroom.

A team with the quality of Man United should be doing more than being in the top 4 and playing good football "at times," with the individual quality they have, you could put you or I as manager and they would score goals and entertain at times purely out of individual quality. I am unsure at what point Solskjaer has proven to you that he has the tactical nous or indeed the competence to have United challenging seriously for the title. You don't sign Ronaldo, Varane and Sancho on top of the players they already had to be in the top 4. I think that Farke is changing formations and players from the outside basically out of desperation to see what sticks. They don't have enough quality, they sold their best player and their recruitment was haphazard, for some reason more loanees than when they were in the Championship along with some cheap gambles. They seem to treat the Premier League as if they don't want to be there.

I certainly don't think that 9 games in which we have started well overwrites a full season of stagnation and going backwards. But equally, it is totally unfair to put losses down to bad management and wins down to luck.

They perform like a set of individuals and Solskjaer does not have anything like the tactical astuteness that the likes of Tuchel and Guardiola have at the top end of the table. McTominay is ok, certainly not a title challenging central midfielder, and him and the poor Fred are unable to provide the balance and platform for the attacking players to attack safe in the knowledge that the midfield battle will be won. The team tend to play as a series of very talented individuals rather than a well drilled team. Van Gaal and Mourinho both got sacked. Although I suspect that the latter's medals will not be eclipsed by Solskjaer. Is 16 successive losses anything but an embarrassment?

United will IMO never genuinely compete for the title with Solksjaer in charge, he will never make a team packed full of quality better than the sum of its parts. The weakness on the pitch is the midfield, the attacking options are as good as any and the back 4 is really good too, but the middle part of McTominay and Fred is average/poor. They need a top manager otherwise the likes of Ronaldo, Pogba, Fernandes, Rashford, Varane etc will only take them so far. Burnley look like they have a talent in Cornet although he got injured yesterday. I suspect that Burnley will be fine as always though. Norwich have seemingly again poorly prepared for a Premier League season, they get a lot of credit for how they are run but their recruitment once they go up leads to embarrassment on the pitch, 16 successive losses at this level. Watford and Brentford look much more at home at this level.

The grim feeling of walking off a game having beaten a Premier League team.

Brilliant performance, no one really less than 7 out of 10. Thought the front 3 were excellent. Gallagher looked like a different animal, his technical ability and first touch are sorely lacking but he was putting himself about, got his goal, was running in behind, was as good a performance from him as I remember. Dolan was really good, excellent assist and also a nicely taken goal, and generally was a threat, very impressive. Brereton is really chalking the numbers up in front of goal, and also the way that the 3 were played has received much criticism including from myself with Dolan central, today it was bang on. In midfield, the 3 dovetailed well. Travis was tenacious, Buckley kept winning the ball back, I still think he needs to work on getting that final ball right more often, that is the next step and he certainly did for the first goal, and I though Rothwell was as good as he has been for a while too. Shout out for Pickering, I felt I was justified in suggesting that he took a few games to get to grips with things, he now looks very steady, good on the ball and really good at anticipating things, a world away from the clowns we have had there in recent years, Ayala is excellent, Lenihan was good and him going off disrupted us for 15 minutes, and Nyambe again was good and saved Kaminski's blushes at one point. Credit to Mowbray aswell. Shouldn't be in the job but you can't reasonably do anything but praise the start to the season, that is down to him as was the rubbish season last season. Just a shame that the team will soon be broken up into small pieces due to the disinterest of the owners.

What utter rubbish.

Or finished in the top half and got to the semi final of the cup in his full season here, which only got away from us really when Samba got sent off. I don't think that anyone really considers Allardyce on par with Hughes and Souness based on his time here, although to be fair he did get a comparatively very bad hand. Both obviously had much more time, and the financial landscape had somewhat moved on both elsewhere and indeed here, Souness brought in plenty for decent amounts, Hughes did very well in the market but tended to be able to buy someone each summer, I remember a summer under Allardyce when we could only afford an unwanted Benjani on a free and Mame Diouf on loan.

There is an element of sensibility and prudence but to the degree that we are cutting back, seemingly unable to offer our more established players competitive contracts to protect their value with a potential sale down the line, I suspect that it is counter productive. I also think that FFP is seen by some as the primary barrier to Venkys spending money, I am not sure there is much substance to that and certainly not much evidence.

I find it very puzzling the general attitude even amongst the fans in the cups, as many seemed happy to lose to Morecambe as those unhappy to see us fall to an embarrassing loss. Suppose we have a league campaign that will fizzle out to focus on.

https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/sport/19599557.blackburn-rovers-ceo-venkys-finance-macron-talks-start-seaon/ Seems clear that Venkys have instructed considerable financial cutbacks, no mention of FFP either. Happened before and is happening again, exaggerated by Covid.

https://www.rovers.co.uk/news/2021/september/-We-have-to-find-the-answer-to-get-his-body-to-a-state-of-robustness-/ Sounds like Rankin Costello is still well away from first team involvement having picked up a hamstring injury. His injury proneness is a huge worry, he makes Ayala look robust. With Nyambe set to leave on a free, Rankin Costello will seemingly be next in line, which itself is questionable, but he is of no use if he is made of glass.