This season Eduoard and Mateta have scored the grand total of 9 goals in 69 appearances.

I do believe there is a player there inside Edouard but I am yet to be convinced we will see that in a Palace shirt.

Mateta and Edouard can both go in my opinion. If you wrote the names of every single striker in the Premier League, put them in a hat and pulled two out, you'd do well to pull out a worse pair.

Edouard I think has the ability but lacks the effort a lot of the time. Mateta simply isn't good enough.

We need new midfielders but up front is by far the biggest area in which we could radically improve, there has to be a couple of young options in the Championship.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold...

Both he and Edouard have proved to be lacking at PL level.

OE has scored a couple of decent goals, Mateta is all energy and bustle with little end product.

Both may do a 'Sorloth' with other clubs but we need a Glenn Murray replacement and the most skilful I've seen is Gyorkes who has good hold-up play, can lay on passes and can score.

True, not yet proven in the PL but if we don't sign him I am certain he will be in the PL next season.

JPM was signed as cover for Bentake when cash was short to put an end to an appalling saga of failed sttempts to do so on which none of us wish to dwell but which stretched back to signing Wickham at the same time as CB. It takes a lot to make Roy criticise his colleagues in public but the non recruitment of a reserve striker achieved just that; he had a point; CB was our most expensive player but we struggled to get the best from him because whenever he joined or left the side, a radical formation change was enforced. As a poor man's Benteke (term borrowed from another HOL user at the time JPM as signed) he's not too bad and if he was even half as good as CB in the air he'd be quite good. He's never really looked much more than a decent enough reserve for a budget squad; a lot of the time he looks a bit out of his depth but occasionally he pulls something pretty good out of the hat and you wonder if he couldn't be helped to do that more often. The harsh truth is that the fact so many of us - myself definitely included - wished we'd seen him start more often is mainly a comment on how useless Edouard is. He also looks out of his depth much of the time but the bits that stick in the memory are more like last Sunday's debacle than anything quality.

Edited by Charles (01 Jun 2023 11.43pm)

So, it seems Everton want JPM . . . [Link]

I'm a blind man, i'm a blind man, now my room is cold,
When a blind man cries, Lord, he feels it from his soul.
[Link]

he would fit in well with all the other players there. And i would not fear his return visit to Selhurst in a blue shirt.

i would be pleased to see him lining up with Everton's best 11 men.

Kayla did Anfield & Old Trafford