Do you mean the goal he scored against Watford? Siggy is the one who smashed a couple in against QPR in probably his best performance. Hedges didn't score, but he got the goal of the season against Watford. I'd potentially keep both players, but the wages would have to be right. I see them as good squad players but not regular starters for a team hunting the top six, which is what we would hope to be. Siggy maybe needs to show he can put a bit of graft and desire in first though. Think we'd be able to get our money back on Hedges tbh, maybe a slight profit, if it weren't for his contract running down, but it's not big bucks either way. Dolan will only leave for nothing if he goes abroad. Otherwise he's young enough for compensation so long as we've made him an offer on equal or better terms to his current deal.

I think it'd be better to decide on Weimann in particular in January. If he keeps up performance levels and doesn't get injured, we may find we get some competition in the summer despite his age, and we know how well we stave off competition... When would you make a decision on Hedges and Siggy?

This video would suggest we might be less likely to lose Ohashi - sounds like the Japanese are culturally allergic to quitting!

Yeh Nakamura played for them in the second half of the 00's. He's the one that was a beast at free kicks and distance goals if I remember rightly?

Chan is a term of address, or honorific. I thought I'd remembered it as being essentially 'brother', or towards a male friend, but I'm remembering wrong! Apparently 'In general, -chan is used for young children, close friends, babies, grandparents and sometimes female adolescents.' Obviously he's not a female adolescent, but I wonder if it's still a term of endearment kind of thing related to some of those other uses. I also found that 'oniichan' can mean either a familiar form of 'older brother' (which may have been what my memory was thinking) or be a form of address to a young adult male. And I'm thinking the 'O' part could just be an abbreviation of Ohashi, especially since it's separated by the hyphen apparently. So possibly along the lines of either 'kid Ohashi' or 'big brother Ohashi' with some wordplay involved. Perhaps pertaining to the anime fox spirit thing too, or maybe just one of these meanings. Japanese is such a different language to Western languages it can be hard to translate literally! But yeh it may just be the anime thing, though I can't help but feel the 'O' and 'Ohashi' are related. Interesting that Rovers' social media have just started using the moniker without really explaining it at all though 😂

Compensation, not a free, unless he moves abroad. As long as we offer him a deal on similar or better terms.

A centre back with pace is the weakness there, not just a centre back. If Carter gets injured we are as pedestrian as hell there, and the whole team essentially becomes only fit for backs to the wall football.

You could argue it's negative for all the clubs for the same reason. But the Prem clubs have always been able to accumulate more youngsters and get them better loans. Could be part of why the club have become more active in loaning out youngsters to senior levels, even if those levels are hardly impressive, as they may be worried about how sanitised the PL2 has become.

I very nearly wrote 'what's her position?' instead...

Where does she play?

True, but are they ready for it? If they're not, I'm not sure what the effect on confidence and development could be of regular pastings. At least relegation is gone, so in that regard we can afford the risk. Hopefully it works as a step up for the kids and they develop faster, sink or swim I guess, we'll just have to see which they do. I'm not really talking numbers though (although some of those positions, like LB, are a little light for two teams and a heavy fixture schedule), I'm talking quality. A lot of the safer hands at that level are out on loan. The rest, looks like a disproportionate amount of first year scholars, think the U21s will suffer. And then the U18s will suffer because most of their best players are padding the U21s out. Duru shouldn't really be on there, he's in the first team squad now. I doubt he will play many U21 games, just the odd one for fitness. Don't disagree with Batty being loaned out, we really need to start seeing if he can cut it in senior football. Same goes for some of the others. Some though, not heard enough to think there's much point loaning them out as it doesn't seem likely they'll make it here. I know that's a bit cold as they could have careers elsewhere they need to develop for, but I'm more interested in the club's wellbeing. Kids like Finneran and Phillips have shown they don't care about our wellbeing, so I'm not overly fussed on theirs if it comes at the expense of the club in any way. Not to mention getting routinely pasted could hinder the development of those not loaned out. I'm not actually that bothered, nor saying it's going to be a disaster, I was mostly being glib with my initial post, but I do think it will have a detrimental knock on effect for the youth teams, and by extension, potentially on the development of the rest of the crop.

Good thing we've loaned half the squad out then...

Which younger player with more potential though? The only one I can think of is Atcheson, and we loaned him out to gain more first team experience. Think it was a weird extension though, but probably indeed because we wanted to make sure we had cheap cover...certainly seems pointless now we are loaning him out though.

On the above car... you might think, as I did, 'oh well maybe it's really slow to get that efficiency'. Nope, top speed is 110mph which is perfectly ample and I imagine will mean you can go well above the speed limit even uphill, and 0-60mph on the 3-wheel drive version (yeh, 3 wheels, helps the centre of gravity and efficiency apparently) is a brisk 4 seconds, with 6 seconds for the front-wheel drive. It allegedly handles pretty well too. Only seats 2, but the boot space is larger than a Prius or Model 3. I remember hearing about this car (I say car, in the US it'll apparently have to be classified as a motorcycle or autocycle!) about a year or two ago, but it went a bit quiet for a while so I assumed it would go the way of many other exciting tech projects. But recently I've seen videos of people test driving it, and it sounds much closer. The company said they wanted it out in 2024, but I'm guessing 2025 will be more realistic. Might take a bit longer to reach Europe though, and as ever we'll need a right-hand drive version making for us and a few others (they do plan to do that). The design appearance is interesting, very different to any other car, and I suspect some people won't take to it at first. But it's certainly a lot prettier than a Cybertruck, and those have sold bizarrely well. Looks very futuristic. Shouldn't be stupidly expensive either, they're targetting prices between $25,900 to $46,000+ depending on the spec and customisation. Sounds like a big price range but they're offering batteries that do as little as 250 miles, which is still decent when you add in the solar charging. Speaking of the solar, I previously thought you might not get too much benefit from that over here, but Aptera reckon they've calculated that 'even the most dreary places' will average about 8,000 miles of free charging a year. That's pretty much as much as I drive, so I'd probably only have to top it up a little in the winter. This thing is even more impressive than I thought if the numbers are to be believed, and could be an absolute game changer if it scales up well at the prices they intend. And that's just the first iteration... add in better batteries, better solar, better material technologies and generally learning how to improve it, and who knows what it could become. Definitely one to watch if it gets to the finish line.

I was watching a Youtube documentary (I'll post it below) and my mind was a bit blown by something they said in it. It's about the Aptera (not the car on the video thumbnail) - a new car from a startup getting fairly close to release, that may have a range (on the biggest battery variant) of up to 1,000 miles. Which is pretty incredible to begin with, but it also incorporates solar panels into the body which may add up to 40 miles of range a day for free and with no hassle. Obviously that would be somewhere sunny, like California where it's being developed. If you lived somewhere like that, depending on your driving habits you might never need to charge the car. But I already knew all that about it, so that wasn't what blew my mind. The main reason for its insane range isn't a new super battery, it's the amazing aerodynamic efficiency (apparently about 60% of a Toyota Camry's energy is generally used pushing air out of the way!). So how good is the drag reduction on this uniquely shaped car? The whole car has less drag than just one sideview mirror on an average American pickup truck!! That's just ludicrous. And it's not something they're making up based on flawed testing, they've been testing it at NASA facilities, with NASA scientists. Whether the car makes it to market and is a success of course depends on many factors, especially since they're a startup so they'll need the funding to keep coming, but however you slice it that's a masterpiece of engineering.

You're right, no introduction needed at all! Harry Potter will be a real wizard on the pitch, utterly spellbinding. Wand of a right foot. Etc.

I don't care how shaggable they are, so long as they make an impact when they're brought on.

Aye there's some definite pot and kettle in there.

Until this loan, I thought it was just Kofi's surname.

Forgot about Hyam. Would be weird of us to spend even 10k pw on Baker given we also signed Cantwell who I bet is on 15k upwards, and have Travis, known to be one of our highest earners, and Tronstad, all in the same part of the pitch. I suppose Cantwell and Baker may play a little further forward at times though, but they'd be competing for the same spot as each other. Seems an odd way to use the wage budget to me.

Absolutely, perhaps we shouldn't have signed him at all. But once signed he had to take up a slot. Perhaps the club didn't think we'd be maxing out our slots and still want another foreign based player or something, so might as well get a prospect, but I wouldn't have done it myself, especially on a limited budget. All the best bargains are abroad. They'd better be really confident that he's going to be a very good player, but it doesn't sound like he's even pulling up trees in the U21s yet. It's one where I can envision us selling him on to free a slot back up, but time will tell. We really need to be sorting Siggy's permit or else we won't be able to sign any foreign-based players in January without selling one. Part of me wonders if they're considering selling him and that's why there's no permit, but as has been pointed out, having a permit here expands our sale options and potentially his value. Any foreign club would just be able to sign him to a pre-contract in January, which would leave us stuck with a player taking up a slot until summer if we didn't get him onto a permit. We wouldn't be able to sell him to another club at that point, so the best case scenario would be a bargain basement sale to the pre-contract club. I'm not clear on whether he could just be de-registered (wasting a decent wage)...I assume so, but maybe he'd have to leave the country if so? All hypothetical of course, but we need to decide fairly soon what we want to do with him or it will end up out of our hands. If he kicks on he could be a useful asset worth contracting for longer, but I think he could have a hard time establishing a starting berth now, and he likely commands a pretty hefty wage. I'd be surprised if he's not one of our top 3 earners. I'd guess it's him, Travis and Cantwell.

It's irrelevant if he's a first team player. He doesn't qualify for a permit so we must use a slot for him. We could play him in the next game if we wanted to.

I think we're well aware which players are in the slots and how it works. It's basically all publicly available. What I'd like them to ask about is Siggy's work permit.

Not yet. They've been in the third tier before. But very good times for them for sure.

Or we could have just got Siggy's work permit done. It's mystifying that we haven't done this. There are only really two explanations - nobody at the club realises it can be done, or it's seen as a convenient excuse to why we couldn't sign another player from a foreign league. This is assuming it hasn't been done in the background and not announced or leaked, which would be odd.