Pulcinella

Surely John-Jules gets in there

I do be the sense that the lad is a bit of a hotheaded. Be better advised to stay aloof of these things.

Told you we were the oldest football club in the world!

Key thing is we've got to somehow get back up football gravy train. As much as I enjoyed last season I don't want to give up rights to being the bigger club in Sheffield etc. Don't want another 20+ years out of the top league.

When I lived in the North East I used to think the same, but decades later a colleague who was a Sunderland fan debated it with me. It's hard to justify us as a bigger club than Sunderland. All time football league table has Sunderland at 10th and us at 14th: https://www.toffeeweb.com/history/records/alltime.php They've won the top league 6 times - us 4 times. Humbling I know, but like us, most of their success was a century ago.

There's an elephant in the room not being talked about... Whilst teams want to win all games, there's a bigger psychological boost beating a team the size of Wednesday (or Derby this next season). There's no way out of that - only by playing in a league appropriate to our size. That's part of the reason Sunderland found it so hard to go back up.

I reckon Gand liked to pop into The Prancing Pony at Bree for a couple of halves.

Of course you’re right. But in my clumsy attempt to find a logic in signing Wildsmith it would be that we think he’d either be a worthy backup or have a decent sell on fee. Either way, I’m expecting Dawson to be ahead of him as a back up at least at the beginning of the season - due to his success at Exeter. Therefore, seeing as Dawson has hopefully improved with a year long loan, the sensible thing would be to see how well Wildsmith would progress on loan, then next summer decide which one to keep.

Moore had to almost rebuild the whole squad - of course some wouldn’t work out as well as others, but he also had his successes. Scroll back to the first years of Chansiri, that first summer was completely awesome - amazing signings. Thereafter the success diminished to almost zero with players like Jones and Abdi supposedly bolstering the squad but turning out to be duffers. Moore brought us the best transfer window since that first summer.

50 appearances since January 2021 isn’t bad for someone who’s supposed to have fitness issues. Been a great servant to the club. One of the best in recent years.

Leicester

Exactly this. Moore has been very good in the transfer market. Even if I have different opinions on those let go, I choose to defer to the man in charge and close to the players as he surely knows more than me. Looking forward to a good summer of recruitment even if with a modicum of trepidation.

If Wildsmith does stay, I hope he goes out on a season loan and see how much he progresses

Spent the day in Milton Keynes on a course - first day it’s a city! On the way back to London I see cars with Sunderland scarves in the back window.

I went to Junior School near to Bishop Auckland. Pretty much everyone was a Sunderland fan. One lesson we had to do colouring and I wrote SWFC first then coloured over it. I got sent to the corner of the class for not writing SAFC and the teacher never forgave me!