In my view the decisions taken then have a massive impact on our current position, so I completely disagree and would say the bitterness and anger is wholly justified.

Pretty much spot on. Considering how shallow our squad is I think injuries will end up having a huge say in where we finish. I also can't help but think that if Graham struggles for form or fitness we are going to be in trouble. Mowbray must surely be concerned by our lack of forward options?

He's not negative, he's just realistic. I'm of the same mindset and agree with JH on the vast majority of things. There's a bit of remaining giddiness on here due to our promotion from an absolutely dire league last season, and that's fine, but it shouldn't cloud the fact we still have a lot of work to do to make this squad competitive for a 46 game season plus cup competitions. We have no strength in depth and two of our most important players are old and injury prone. Meanwhile we seem only capable of signing loans or players for less than £1m. If that doesn't give cause for concern I'm not sure what will.

It might just be me but I look at that team and see a lot of weaknesses. I'm not too concerned by Raya in goal, but god help us if he gets injured. Nyambe did OK last season in League 1 but still a lot to prove at this level. I've never particularly rated Williams and think he'll be a weak link much like he was in our last Championship campaign. Happy enough with Lenihan and Mulgrew as a DC pairing but an injury to Mulgrew would leave us in trouble. Smallwood had a half decent and half poor season last year, and obviously was a part of Rotherham's relegated side the season before, so it remains to be seen whether he has what it takes. Evans only shows up for a handful of games a season so I'm not happy with him as a starter. Don't rate Samuel at all and will be disappointed if he's starting. Dack and Palmer obviously very good players. I think Dack will be able to make the step up. Graham meanwhile will only be able to play 70 mins max and we have no replacement of any quality for him. Honestly if that's the team we have for most of this season I'd consider staying in the division a decent achievement.

The main issue with loan signings is that they usually have one eye elsewhere, especially if the going starts to get tough. I like the Palmer signing but would certainly be more assured by a couple of decent permanents on sensible contracts.

As our debt is mostly owed to our idiot owners it will only really become a problem whenever they leave - assuming they don't choose to wipe it out. Until then it is, at this point, just an astronomical figure that we can't ever hope to pay off and will continue to get bigger. In fact, the ONLY way we could ever realistically hope to pay it off is by getting promoted into the Premier League. We'll never make a worthwhile profit in the Championship. As an aside, how utterly mismanaged were we to end up with such ridiculous debt? We've made a net profit most seasons as far as transfer fees are concerned, so it's not like we've spent big on transfers and that's how we've ended up in massive debt. It's just been horrendous mismanagement at numerous levels - particularly when it comes to contracts, which have typically been way too long in length and way too high in wage. Even recently you could argue that signing Caddis up for two years was a stupid, unnecessary decision which is costing us an extra year's worth of wages for a player who wasn't even useful last season in a lower division. But really it's the likes of Murphy, Etuhu, Orr and Best that have fucked us over. Terrible decisions and god only knows what we've been paying in wages and signing on/agent fees to end up over £100m in the red.

I've seen people use Cardiff and Fulham as examples of teams who haven't spent big but got promoted. Cardiff's net spend since the 14/15 season is £17m, Fulham £29m. I imagine in comparison Rovers have earned far more than we spent. We don't even seem to have a million to spend on a player these days. We're a long way from being seriously competitive in this league - our goal now appears to be surviving with as little outlay as possible. I don't see that ending well.

The last time we were in this league we were able to make a push for the playoffs buying players for less than £3m - usually far less. Times have certainly changed, and very quickly too. Spending big money in the Championship is high risk due to the lack of TV money relative to the PL. Obviously it all works out if you get there, but if not... Regardless, as long as there are enough owners willing to throw money into the black hole of English football we're going to find it increasingly difficult to compete. For better or worse Venky's aren't the type of owners willing to throw money at the club, so the only other way to compete in this league without much of a budget is to already have a solid base of decent players and a manager who can get the absolute best out of every signing. We'll see soon enough if Mowbray and our squad is up to the task.

I don't think anyone would disagree with that as a sensible plan, but I have serious doubts in the abilities of our owners to support such an undertaking even if that's broadly what Mowbray is aiming for. I'm sure they'll do something to screw it up in due course. 2-3 years without them doing something stupid and detrimental to the club seems like a long time. Here's to hoping though.

Yeah, I only excluded Dack because he hasn't had any major past fitness issues. Mulgrew and Graham on the other hand... That's my concern. We desperately need another decent striker. I know some are expecting Samuel to step up but realistically it isn't going to happen. Without strengthening we're a bottom end Championship team. It's possible we could avoid relegation due to there being teams worse than us, but is that a position we're happy for this club to be in? Venky's are already squandering last season's momentum and good will, as I knew they would, and if we don't start well Mowbray will get sucked into that negative spiral too. I'm honestly pretty concerned at the moment. Hard to believe we were challenging for the playoff spots only a few seasons ago. Seems like a lifetime away now.

The signs aren't hard to read, even for somebody like Nixon. We have apparently decided this squad is good enough - for what, I don't know. Scraping survival I assume. Injuries to Mulgrew or Graham will leave us in pretty deep shit though.

As far as I'm aware Villa still have to raise something like £30m in sales to avoid FFP sanctions. I don't think their new investors can do anything to change that. https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/aston-villa-takeover-ffp-grealish-14935263 A decent summary of Villa's situation here. Keeping Bruce on is a smart move on their part, but I do wonder exactly what was going on with Henry. There was far too much smoke there for there not to be a fire.

Same here. Comes across as an utter buffoon - and it's a shame, as when it comes to football I think he has a solid handle on the game and how to build a half-decent team. You wouldn't think it from listening to him though.

Players we've signed on silly wages like Evans tend to be paid off as opposed to being sold, meaning we save little or no money. Technically they're off the wage budget but from a cashflow perspective nothing has changed - you'd be just as well off keeping the player and just increasing the wage budget.

I'd stick with Bruce too. As a pundit Henry basically came across as a French Alan Shearer, just stating the obvious repeatedly. Although there was also this moment: But who knows, it could work out for him. Or it could end up like Zola at Birmingham.

Everything I've read suggests we have a very small budget for Championship level. I said last season that, in spite of all of the rampant optimism, our natural position with the current owners in charge may be yo-yoing between the Championship and League 1. We've seen and heard nothing so far to suggest we're looking to do anything more than survive this season. If that is the case, you have to wonder what the point is in Venky's owning us. From their perspective we're a consistently loss-making entity with very little room for growth or evolution without significant investment, which they evidently aren't willing to provide. Why the hell won't they listen to offers?

Reports that Henry will be replacing Bruce at Villa. That should be interesting.

Caddis hasn't been fit for purpose since day one. An awful signing, and even more baffling that he was given a two year deal. If he wasn't willing to accept a one year deal I'm sure we could have found a traffic cone willing to accept cheaper terms and which would have done the same job, if not better.

When did counter attacking football become anti-football? It's been around for decades and some of the best teams in history have played a counter attacking style. Belgium and Croatia need to realise that being defensively solid isn't a crime, it's actually extremely important if you want to win things. Playing pretty football is pointless if you can't keep your opponents from scoring against you.

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/44847460 Strange comments from Lovren here. Granted France didn't exactly play scintillating football, but they were hardly playing anti-football either. Croatia's "beautiful football" mostly came through the genius of Modric. Take him out of the team and I imagine they'd play somewhat differently.

Our first fixture is 04/08 - 19 days away. Any signing we bring in now will realistically only have about two weeks to bed in and a limited pre-season. By this time last season we'd already signed Whittingham, Dack, Smallwood &, Gladwin. The rest of July saw Samuel & Caddis come in. In August we signed Leutwiler, Chapman, Antonsson, Harper, Hart and Downing. So far this summer we've only signed Rothwell and Davenport. No players sold as of yet, but realistically we're going to need a stronger squad if we want to compete at the higher end of the table. Imo it's more likely we'll be fighting it out with the likes of Burton, Bolton, Ipswich, Rotherham, etc at the bottom end of the league.

If Southgate has any sense or ambition he will watch that Crotia match back and pinpoint exactly when we lost the game and why. He'd do well to watch the Colombia match as well because there were similarities in how we lost control of a match we were dominating. His inability to react to Croatia's tactical changes are undoubtedly a big part of why we ended up losing, and he needs to learn from it if he wants to be successful going forward.

Sterling can terrorise defences with his pace, but yesterday in the second half he was totally anonymous. He, Lingard and Alli all vanished from the game in an attacking sense. Lingard and Alli were at least attempting to contribute to the defensive side of the game which is probably why Sterling was brought off instead. I thought Rashford did okay when he came on. He wanted the ball and had control over it. Unfortunately everybody around him was tired, and as you say Kane had stopped running making it difficult to link up effectively. I couldn't decide whether Young was tired or just rubbish. Probably a bit of both. Rose should have started imo. I'm glad that's the last we'll see of Young in an England shirt. Set pieces aside he's been one of the weakest links in our team this tournament.

I think if we'd have scored a second in the first half we would have gone on to win the match. Going in at 1-0 is always dangerous for a team as defensively suspect as England, and Croatia looked rejuvenated in the second half. Once they realised how well their tactical switch was working their energy and confidence soared. It was a matter of time at that point as Southgate either wouldn't or couldn't react to what was happening. We did well to get to extra time and I can't help but think come Sunday Croatia may rue adding another unnecessary half an hour to one of their matches.

I should note that whilst my above post sounds a little negative, it's worth remembering that we only really started playing our current system during this tournament. For whatever reason we didn't play this way during the qualifiers, hence the low expectations going into the world cup. If we stick with this system and work on improving the parts that aren't quite working there's no reason we can't be much stronger come Euro 2020. There is a framework here and we need to stick to it.