There is a rich irony that three years ago 20/21 season we were a very ordinary team, struggling to stay out of relegation, playing dire football and no one on the team attracting big club interest.
Now, we are playing better football, brought in some real talent at decent prices and have International players in the squad so the big clubs now see us as fertile ground for pickings!

SP said we would never let Wilf and Olise go in the same window and yet here we are..... You don't have to be a genius to figure out this scenario, so it is a little shocking we look from the outside to be "surprised" and reactive. Getting Lerma for a free was great business, who knows about Franca, but if we loose top players now, one feels we will be scrambling and replacing them with marginal players. You have to play both an offensive and defensive strategy in a transfer window to attract and retain talent - pretty basic stuff and instead looks like we are very naive and caught with our pants down.

All of our good signings have been made early in the windows, all our questionable signings have been late in the windows - seems like "groundhog day" all over again to me.

At the risk of repetition...

We can afford £35k a week wages. They can pay £135k a week plus.

We have finite resources and must wait till deadline or else slip one in under the radar. Impossible really as agents will leak the details in order to increase the price. Only the rich can buy early at list price. We can improve of course. Brighton are showing the way. But to whine about us not getting all our targets in early ignores the bigger picture.

Thus your complaint is that they have bottomless funds and we do not. Did you really need to tell us that?

You are absolutely right.

Problem is that if we sell too many and don't adequately replace even 11th place becomes unlikely. Doesn't take too much for 11th to become 18th.

Hang on a minute we were going to pay a deteriorating Wilf 200k/week surely we could offer a growing talent who out performed Wilf last season a reasonably competitive salary?

That's how I see it too.

Dad and I watched games standing on the muddy slope of the Holmesdale Road end. He cheered and I rattled.

It does only add to things.

It's not new, and it may always be painted as overreaction, but I do worry about the club in such circumstances (transfer window).

There's all the rumblings about the actual transfer dealings themselves, ubiquitous amongst football fan groups, but this one is stinging a bit differently as we seemed to have adopted a policy of buying younger players who will deliver, develop a higher price, then be sold off and replaced. We don't seem to be doing the replacement/process repeat however which is extremely worrying as it comes across as just selling off our best players, who all constitute about 1/3 of the squad. So we're left with a small squad lacking in quality. Hence not even being able to put out a reasonable forward line at season's start.

I recognise we typically do any business quite late on, but you have to despair as to why we've only brought two players in thus far and with only one suitable to be put in the first team? Barring a late 'splurge' to bring in a few high quality players it looks very precarious. It's not even a case of wanting to move forward, just not falling too low and having something to inspire any confidence or optimism for the season ahead. I also highly doubt a number of good incomings is what we will see.

I do fear for both the team and the fanbase. If Olise does go, with claims of 'tapping up' yielding nothing and proving only a distraction, we're starting games with Ayew/Edouard/Schlupp up front, perhaps sell another player/lose someone to injury and go on the all too familiar long winless run, spitting of feathers could escalate further. Seeing it already on this thread which will to some degree reflect the fanbase.

Now Zaha's got a bit of green grass ahead of him here... and finds Ambrose... not a bad effort!!!!