goodrobotusses

Keep it coming, Luke, inject it into my veins.

I'll be sad to see Gomez go, but if Konate is staying this season, he kind of needs to if we're to give Leoni any game time. If we wanted Gomez to stay, we should have left Leoni on loan in Italy.

It's almost as if we knew we could put NUFC's backs to the wall by waiting until the very end to sign Isak, knowing they needed the money to sign players and wouldn't have the time to reject our offer and ask for more money if they wanted to get any deals done themselves. If only we'd "got the deal done" earlier by bidding and bidding our way up to £150m+.

Please someone tweet this at him on the hour every hour.

As Tony Soprano would say, "like Gary Cooper".

Luke Edwards gonna be drowning his sorrows and punching whatever fine Arabian steed comes into view tonight. Been a wild ride watching him go from "not happening" to "only if NUFC sign two strikers and get £150m" to "deal happens for £125m after NUFC sign one striker", while he insists it's £130m and rambles on about what a great journalist he is. So who has the AI skill to superimpose Slot's head into that vid of Edwards dancing?

He's playing himself into the right-back role permanently.

Good move for Gomez as he’s not gonna get many minutes here even if he stays fit. Been a great servant and wish him all the best if he does go.

Bayern are not the well-oiled machine you'd think. Still a big club, and way bigger than anyone else here in Germany, but they have been struggling to recruit for a couple of seasons now, even if Olise looks like an inspired buy in hindsight. Kompany was way down their list of coaches and they've been giving out some mad contracts to get lads to join and extend (Kane, Davies, Musiala, Diaz). Even if Bayern could only occasionally get the bigger stars from abroad, they could always rely on how easy it was for them to cannibalise the best of the Bundesliga. But with the financial power and attractiveness of the PL, they can't even do that anymore, with our taking Wirtz and Woltemade going to Newcastle. As an aside on Woltemade, only just found out he's 24 in February. Thought he was a teenager. Massive risk for NUFC.

Are you tweeting from September 1 or did I miss something? Are you that lad from Interstellar all miserable on a rocket ship in the future?

We’re doomed.

Yeah, but was there some CB we didn’t buy that year because his club wanted X and we wouldn’t go beyond Y? Different story. I’m not saying the club haven’t made mistakes and won’t continue to do so, gambles that don’t pay off etc. But it feels like every time we enter negotiations for a player, you get the drip-drip of information in the press and on social media that the selling club wants some figure and we’re haggling for a lower price. This usually leads to panicked calls of “just pay the f***ing price” and so on, as if trying to get the best deal possible is a bad thing. Then we usually sign that lad for a better price or he f***s off elsewhere (usually Real Madrid) because that’s what he wanted all along. My question was whether our practice of negotiating for the best price possible (and likewise negotiating upwards when selling) has cost us players in any significantly damaging way. I’m sure having Nat Philips kicking around for years wasn’t great for his career, but it didn’t exactly derail the club, and in terms of buys I can’t think of a case of us lowballing ourselves out of a deal. Just “getting the deal done” while buying is how Man Utd end up paying £70m for Mbeumo, or whatever they forked out in fee and wages for Sancho and Antony and so on.

Who did we miss out on in recent times because we didn’t cough up? Lavia?

I wonder how much more we'd have spent on players over the last 10 years if the club had always responded to calls of "just get it done" / "just pay the money" by simply upping our offer to whatever the selling club was supposedly demanding to appease those calls. Probably an Alexander Isak's worth.

Think Gomez goes if Guehi comes in. If he stays, one of he or Leoni are gonna get no minutes with 5 CBs in the squad. Think Gomez only stays if Konate gets sold to Madrid. Arsenal’s net spend is so high because they’re terrible sellers. And that despite probably having a more productive academy than us (it certainly produces “bigger” names at least). Would you rather we were like that?

Apparently he was the same at Bournemouth, wouldn't want to use the players the club recruitment had bought for him. Rodgers-like.

"Domestic rival". The f***ing clown.

Think our “increments of £1” negotiating technique might have to be sacrificed with three days of the window left.

Probably got a nurse with a little hand in to cup the players’ balls.

You'd assume a couple of those would be filtered out on account of age.

So NUFC want to replace the rat Isak with… Fermin? THE MYTHICAL DOOR HAS BEEN OPENED "Tops off, lads, we've just signed our 17th-choice striker target!"

While I'd be worried about our thinness in attack and defence were we not to get Guehi and Isak (or an alternative) over the line by the end of the window, we went into the summer thinking Isak was an absolute non-starter. No one was really thinking about him any more when we were celebrating the Wirtz deal, although we knew we would need to replace Nunez. Had the possibility of signing Isak never come up and we replaced Nunez with Ekitike, I think we'd have been happy with that at the start of the summer. That said, were Isak not on the table and Diaz still sold, I definitely would have expected us to sign another winger/forward. I'm not gonna lose my s*** if Isak doesn't happen, because there's only so much we can do if NUFC are being useless and awkward, and I kind of don't blame the club for putting all our eggs in that basket once the opportunity presented itself, but I don't think it's unreasonable to be concerned about the state of the squad without another forward and CB. Saw that. Would be amazing if that happens and his signing allows us to get Isak, as we will have inadvertently eaten Bayern's lunch twice in one summer – he's the lad they want as Kane's long-term replacement.

I actually loved how we were time-wasting and winding NUFC up from the first whistle. It was as if they and their fans had forgotten this has been their stock in trade for 2-3 years.

Thank god I'm not the only one. Although I laugh sometimes at the bottom lip sad face / frowny frown "we lost" ones.

I mean this kind of thing: I have the feed recommendations on YT turned off so don’t get rival fan stuff. I subscribe to Redmen for the episodes with Josh Williams, but cannot fathom the appeal of these kinds of videos. The thumbnail reaction pics make me want to watch them even less.