He’s gone from Stoke to WBA.
That “training at Liverpool for a season” on his CV brought him a few more short term deals.
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Well, they are supposed to replace Shaqiri/Ox/Keita
Just looking at this again, and I’d go with a backline of
Kabak Virgil Konate
Gets Kabak and Konate on their natural side and puts Van Dijk where he can run the show. I also think if anyone needs to be able step out from the middle, Van Dijk is the man to do it. Gomez can play anywhere across that line as well.
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The fact you are moving players around means you are in! 
and yes Van Dijk stepping through the lines to unleash a shot would be a thing of sheer powerful beauty.
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How many times did Shaqiri play CM for us, twice? It’s okay if we want to replace Shaqiri who mainly plays more forward here (in a different way to Salah), but then we need someone who comes in off the right more.
What Grealish plays this season all the time is basically Mane’s position here, but in a different way of course. He did play at times (last season) advanced in midfield like Coutinho did. Then Villa decided they want more balance and they’re better if Grealish is let off the hook more, starting from the inside left position, but combining between the lines, dribbling, providing numbers, etc.
Maddison plays more central and a bit more deeper at times, but he’s still very much a #10 (or between the lines with Leicester’s recent switch to 3 at the back). Of all these English offensive midfielders, only Mount is recently showing the quality, maturity and consistency to drop deeper at least without the ball (like he did against Real, on the ball going forward, but off the ball dropping deeper to make it a match 3v3 in central midfield).
He’s playing next to Phillips who has the turning circle of an oil tanker and lacks any kind of pace. He’s being pulled back by the need to cover Phillips.
The shape has been off all season but injuries have caused a lot of that. When Alisson is out injured, the defenders don’t have that sweeper keeper type behind them to minimise the window for the ball over the top. Losing all our centre backs means the line has to drop deeper. Moving Fabinho and Henderson into defence means the shield in front of the centre backs that help cover the fullbacks when they go forward has been removed.
Unfortunately, we’ve been hit by long term injuries that have not only meant the loss of the injured player but the adjustments needed to accommodate their replacements have impacted those that are left on the pitch.
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One thing that must be considered, is the impact on player psychology and morale of quality new arrivals.
Constant squad improvement and evolution ensures competition for places, thus enhancing individual performance, whilst also giving the manager enough options to rotate and maintain the level of the side, thus helping avoid fatigue and injury from overuse.
However, as importantly, it boosts morale, it says to our better players that the club is doing its bit to give them the platform from which to win things. It says to them that they must perform or the club will go out and replace them.
We’ve seen how we stepped up in recent seasons after good acquisitions for all the above reasons.
Go into next season with three senior centre backs, two very injury prone, the other returning from a career threatening injury, and ask Fabinho how he feels about that.
These are tough times, but we have enough examples of other big clubs to look to for indications of where things could head.
Arsenal and Spurs are prime examples of the aftermath of underinvestment in playing staff to fund infrastructure. City have shown that they will continue to set very high standards for us to better, United and Chelsea have shown they will not tolerate being out of the race for long and will buy their way back in.
We need to go our own way, be intelligent, be creative, but this has to be underpinned by the club being seen to be bringing in quality players to fix obvious problems.
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Aye, makes sense this. The good news is that that is exactly what the owners have been willing to do over the last few years, spend money on big transfers to make instant improvement to the team if needed. I don’t think being out of the CL will mean we spend less, I think the owners will try and make damned sure we get back in it ASAP. So if we need to spend to make that happen then that is what we will do.
I had hoped hat Thiago would be a moral boosting signing for this season, i.e you’ve just wiped the floor with the competition in the PL, now you have one of the worlds best midfielders joining the ranks, enjoy. Hasn’t worked out that way for many reasons but it shows the willingness to keep investing in the squad.
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At the moment it looks like
Kabak & Konate
Neuhaus
Malen
Don’t have much reservation about the first three, but Malen!!! Why not Daka?
He scored 17 goals in 29 matches and that in the weak Dutch Mickey Mouse competition. A competition where the standard of defending is: give the forward 2 meters room to manoeuvre and let’s see what happens, entertaining the crowd is much more important than winning. 
We don’t need mediocrity!
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Did you just copy-paste one of your previous posts???
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I like Neuhaus but I think he would need time to adapt.
It looks like Daka will follow his current coach to Leipzig.
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Not my preference too. But not because he is Dutch 
I would prefer an out and out CF - we have enough versatile forwards.
Also not think Malen is going to happen. Neres, Promes, Bergwijn, Ziyech, Lozano… the list goes on. We’ve been linked with everyone but none did happen.
Dirk Kuyt, Ryan Babel
Sander Westerveld, Jan Kromkamp, Luis Suarez, Sami Hyypiä 
Was talking about attacking players we were linked with in the last two or three years from the Dutch League.
Malen to me seems to be another one that’s not going to happen.
Naming these two
in the same sentence with
is pure slander 
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Depends how reliably linked. Not difficult to imagine that we followed the development of maybe all of those mentioned + many more.
For now, Malen is not realiably linked with us. Just the usual every day crap. We’ll see if something serious appears.
Not only Malen, but for now we can only say we’re properly linked Konate “for sure”.
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The added issue with Malen is his agent is Raiola and that means two things.
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Any deal for him will also include a nice chunk for that parasite.
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If he turned out to be any good, Raiola would be looking to move him on in a couple of years for a nice pay day. If he isn’t getting game time, he won’t hesitate to kick up a fuss amd push him to move so he stays in the spotlight.
Raiola seems like the exact kind of character we’d actively try and avoid dealing with if at all possible.
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Good point Rab. If the player is so good that we really want him, we might overcome the hurdle of dealing with an objectionable agent. If the player is second tier, sort of a squad man who might become good for us, I can’t see us going near, with said agent.
On the agent front, there needs to be some togetherness with the clubs to not deal with certain people and squeeze them out the game that way. Also, the whole thing need better regulation.
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