KegCity

Not a fan personally. I understand why clubs, and businesses in general, are choosing minimalist logos but they’re often bland.

He's got a contract to play for. Great to see Williams in the last few weeks, his most consistent spell for the club in my view. Hope he can both keep this up and stay fit until the end of the season.

It’s all guesswork though isn’t it? Nobody knows what he’s earning. We don’t know our wage structure, but if we want a player good enough to string our attack together and get us into the playoffs that’s how much we’ll have to pay. Did I say we’re not paying a loan fee? I said it would more than likely to be taken into account in the buy option e.g when put with the buy option it comes to the value of the player. We’ve done the same with TGH by all accounts.

He’s a squad player for Burnley. Would probably be similar wages to Weimann at the most, and if he’s coming in to be our main creative player that’s fair enough. Loan fee would be taken into account in the option to buy. There’s plenty to moan about with city but us properly investing in a creative midfielder, which we badly need, isn’t high up on the list! If it was the £5 million move that was initially quoted I’d be with you about the finances.

What are you talking about? We lack creativity, Manning has worked with Twine before and £2.5 million is a fair fee. Wages won’t be astronomical. I’m glad we’re neither sitting on the Scott money nor blowing it on overpriced signings. Reports starting to say it’s a loan with a buy option, even better.

Can’t have it all. Do we want to bring in quality? If so we’re going to have to spend money, we can’t just be a side made up of gems from league one.

Panic over, we’re not spending 5 million. Whilst there’s disappointment we couldn’t sign him for free, we’re addressing one of our biggest weaknesses and getting Manning’s first choice through the door. Very happy with that.

Are there any football clubs that aren’t making those losses? If a mess like Birmingham can get fresh investment we can too.

What big decisions have the Lansdowns got right? Appointing Cotterill and Gary Johnson? We need fresh ideas and we need people who know the game to run the club.

Makes sense if he’s still based in Solihull. Hope someone else is coming in, Weimann can cover several areas and we’ll miss having that extra body.

Can’t see us putting down £700k for a loan and not keeping him.

I can see why he’s done it. If he takes Ngannou seriously he should be able to outbox him, making him look better than Fury who got sat down by Francis. I think if Ngannou lands that big punch as he did to Fury, Joshua doesn’t get back up.

He’s playing Wembley and the Principality. Assume Ashton Gate isn’t big enough.

I know. Hence why I said in my original post that we need to make players believe they can get to the Premier League with us.

Plenty of clubs on the cusp of promotion have been able to keep their top players, they’ve taken them up with them.

Exactly, if players believe they can get to the Premier League with City, rather than via City, they’re much more likely to stay.

Think that summarises the situation very well. It’s easy to forget just how bad the culture within the squad was when Pearson arrived. He was what we needed at the time, Manning certainly appears to be what we need now. Important not to get carried away though, if we get beat by Birmingham it will be a lot more doom and gloom.

I appreciate that. I’m not one of those who expect the owner to just splash crazy amounts of money, I understand FFP etc. I just want a clear plan and good decision making. I think we’ve lacked that for a long time.

I don’t consider top 2 realistic and I’m not silly enough to think we should be spending outrageous money every summer. I’m fed up of seeing clubs with smaller budgets etc overtaking us while terrible decisions and general incompetence hold us back. We’ve seen it recently with the Pearson fiasco and player analysts conducting manager interviews. Someone who hasn’t been in the pub all day can be far more articulate than me, but my patience for the current regime has ran out. Have seen plenty of “worse” owners get promotion etc before being outsted

The bar is so low isn’t it? Not letting the stadium fall down or us to go bust, whilst going from the championship to the championship via league one is enough for some people. All while making incompetent decisions year after year and overseeing hundreds of millions of pounds worth of losses. I genuinely wish I could be content with that. I want more, I want a genuine promotion charge. I must be ungrateful.

What is it about that particular chant that makes the players lose concentration?

What else is a measure of achievement? Amount of academy players in the first team? Community outreach? Both great of course but not the same as winning, or at least progressing, on the pitch.

No I just don’t particularly value silverware that we won after getting relegated. We could have another run of consecutive relegations, but winning the national league wouldn’t make up for the initial failure.

From a league we shouldn’t have dropped into in the first place! We were in the championship when Lansdown took over, took a backwards step getting relegated, recovered by getting back into the championship and have got nowhere since. I’ll be the first to admit we recovered in style, it would be better if we hadn’t filled the squad with overpaid journeymen and not got relegated in the first place. Not letting the stadium fall down to me is the bare minimum from the owner. I appreciate not every owner can say they’ve done that but it’s not a massive ask. Lansdown bailing himself out after losing big chunks of money isn’t much of an achievement to me either. We could of course be in a much worse position, but we could be in a much better one. We’ve seen enough “smaller” clubs not have to have a fire sale every summer just to tread water shoot past us into the Premier League.

All won at league one level? Huge achievement for the club that’s been trying and failing to finish in the play offs of the championship for nearly 20 years. Exactly. Which is why “consistent championship football” should be the bare minimum.