Groundhopping Owl

Benik Afobe was garbage for us as well, people forget that as they look at how he did after his time with us.

Sod's law dictates that we gave Nuhiu a new deal and his performances promptly nose-dived, so when we learn the lesson and release Palmer he'll inevitably go to another Championship side and turn into a world-beater.

I agree that it's down to Penney to displace him and I suspect that next season he will, but Penney is out injured until April so I wouldn't say Fox's run in the team reflects badly on him at present.

It's based on his scoring record before he came here - which was fine when we were blowing up about him being loaned out to Derby, but his Barnsley days are a long way behind him now.

I vaguely remember being at a steering group meeting and someone (think it was either Trevor Braithwaite or Joe Palmer) said that the club's rough estimate was around 100,000. Seems about right to me, obviously depending on how you define a "fan".

In terms of players we brought in, Marco Matias had a lot of hype and a brilliant goalscoring record in Portugal. Remember him missing two big chances on his debut against Bristol and thinking that once he'd settled in he'd start sticking them away and be the sort of player who could lead us to promotion. If only...

I'm going to have a real job getting there. Absolutely livid with Sky for their asinine timing of this fixture.

Good hear that he's so on the ball about the squad's strengths and deficiencies - the weaknesses have been ignored for far too long so this needs to change now, hopfeully Bruce is the man to do it.

A third tier club spending those sort of sums. Absolutely mad.

Suspect his wages would be prohibitively high - we couldn't afford to keep Rhodes here, Wickham's pay will be in the same ballpark.

About the same we payed for Pelupessy - same situation as their contracts were both up in the summer. Not a bad bit of business really, I doubt we're paying him more than about £10-12k/week.

The club has been sloppy on this front for years, I wouldn't hold your breath.

Indeed, parachute payments didn't make it into enough of a closed shop so they had to have another go.

Does make me wonder if there's something to the suggestions that DC is hanging on and hoping that the FFP rules will be relaxed to avoid half the Championship plunging off the rails. The system as it's currently set up is farcical - right intentions but appallingly implemented.

Iorfa is a good deal as I doubt we've payed a particularly high fee for him (am I right in thinking his deal was up in the summer anyway?). The other two are loans that will boost the squad without breaking the bank, so again it's good business. I don't think these signings will push us over the line in terms of some unlikely play-off push, but they keep some optimism around the place with the derby coming up and mean that results over the second half of the season should be pretty decent and we may well be able to climb towards the top half. What Bruce needs is to get to the summer with a decent set of results behind him so that the fans can unite behind the club for next year, he surely knows himself that anything beyond that would be a huge bonus.