We've been locked in a battle of wits for eleven years. Sometimes he's on top. Sometimes I am. It's pretty much a Zen thing to be honest.
Thanks for the offer Kemps but it's a bloody long way to walk from Northumberland. Although we are off to Scarborough tomorrow for a week so who knows?
a) They haven't been that surprising. b) Because it's mid July and we've signed five players already. Two of the three relegated clubs haven't signed anybody and the other has signed one first teamer and one youth player. Compared to others, we're doing pretty well. The transfer window doesn't shut until August 31st, so we've got a month and a half to go yet. Also, given our situation, we'll be looking at loans and teams spend this time working out who they want to keep on and who they want to send out. In the case of Baxter, that was already decided, but others won't have. Scott won't be sold because we bought him for a seven figure fee and the likes of St Mirren and St Johnstone can't afford that. In the situation we're in, we aren't going to piss a million quid away just to be shot of him. Add to that he's highly rated at the club and has plenty of room to improve.
According to the embargo restrictions, it says 23 senior playing squad allowed. The players you mention going out are forward players or midfielders. We urgently need a right-sided centre back, this Wimbledon player was being lined up by all accounts, but that was 2 or 3 weeks ago and nothing has happened since. It seems to me that the squad is having to be tailored to fit what we need and to get another player in one or more players have to be offloaded to make room for a centre back to come it. I may or may not be right, but that is what I feel is the situation. On Berry, like you, I'm not surprised he was let go, but from what I understand he was probably the player that was felt could be offloaded in order to reduce the playing squad to meet the 23 allowed.
Our list of 1st team squad 'outs' is ELEVEN (see updated 1st post in this thread). OK 2 were already out on loan. So call it 9 if we must (but it's still 11). Versus 5 in. And that's without looking at the LONG list of 'youth' outgoings. I'm not panicking at all. And it is what it is. But it's rather misleading those stating "but we've signed 5 already ... we're doing well". At this stage, we aren't and we should be clear on what's happening here. Yes, time left, let's see. TWT.
In reality, Reece Burke is the only outgoing permanent player you could consider a loss, the rest either barely played for us, or didn't play at all and the outgoing loan players were always likely to be replaced later in the window.
The 23 man playing squad is nonsense & people only want it to be true so they can have a whinge at the Allams.
We can have 25 established players, which is those who are over 21. If we could only have the 23 pros as the embargo rules state, why did we give Harry Wood his debut on the last day of the season? He would now count as 1 of the 23. We took the money in L1 so we've known the terms a good while. That would make that decision ridiculous. We probably operated under the same restrictions in Jan too and nobody mentioned anything and recruitment was still extremely good.
Players under 21 on loan to us count in the 25, our own under 21 don't. https://www.efl.com/-more/governanc... such other date and,be notified by the Board.
Baz knew it was 25, he said so in his Q&A but still wrote a fear-mongering piece saying it's 23. And tried to say that's why we released James Berry. Didn't explain why we loaned out Chadwick, Jones & Flores (all of whom would count) though.
I haven't read the last 25 pages, can someone explain what our squad limit is? Who bloody knows, who bloody cares.