Football

What do you mean? Of course he has a red card in his pocket next to his heart. He just doesn't like to show it because it's adorned with the Manyoo logo!

Meanwhile, Babel has actually put his twitter to good use for once: http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story/_/...trouble?cc=3436

We have nothing in the bank. When the new owners joined they said they would concentrate on buying young talents that were cheap and provided good re-sale value. They've laid low since then so I suppose nothing has changed. Considering our financial mess, I don't see them coming out to make purchases in an over-inflated market for an interim manager unless there was a really good deal on offer (*cough* Manuel Fernandes or Lass Diara *cough*). Meanwhile, Steve Clarke (yes, the first team coach that was at Chelsea not too long ago) has decided to join us. Anyone know what he brings to the table?

Seems to me that the two big stains on Dalglish's managerial record involve falling out with Freddy Shepherd and not being able to turn John Barnes into a tactical genius. The audacity of the guy! Impenetrably voiced crank with possible criminal affiliations? Sure. Out of touch? With what, how crap Liverpool are? I'd say he's had a pretty good vantage point. Besides, they don't deserve Klopp.

Starting online petition to bring Klopp to LFC now.

So apparently, our first signing of the January window is (you've guessed it) - David Miliband.

Question is, will he start on Sunday or be used as an impact substitute?

I hear Miliband plays in the centre but would rather be a bit closer to the right wing!

Typical. So even with Miliband (allegedly) now on board, we still lack a genuine left winger.

Thank goodness that's over with. Unless my judgement was impaired by watching the game on a crappy YouTube-esque feed (I couldn't see the ball on full screen mode) or having to witness Kevin Nolan's revolting chicken dance for a fourth time this season, our derby day proved to be a dismal display of football that wouldn't have looked out of place in 1925. So little genuine quality or positional sense on show that it resembled an ill-disciplined kickabout in the park. The Barcodes have an odd knack of exposing our weaknesses, while coaxing us into playing the type of physical game that we simply don't have the steel to contest, with or without a fit Cattermole.

If nothing else, the game should highlight our desperate need for quality service to Benty, Gyany and Welbecky from wide areas. Elmohamady, though full of pace and trickery, can't cross to save his life, while Malbranque and Richardson looked dreadfully out of their element on the left. Someone who can take a decent free-kick wouldn't go amiss either.

A curious feeling of fear seems to be building up within me that if I actually start to believe, there'll be a massive kick in the teeth for us in the near future.

Ah, there it is - right on schedule.

Presumably meaning Young will soon be off.

To Liverpool, right?

How do you feel about the signing Fred? I'm not sure Bent is really the guy who will solve your problems...

One signing was never going to solve our many, many problems but given how toothless we are up front having Bent certainly can't hurt. In fact all he has to do is complete one successful forward pass and he'll have surpassed Stephen Ireland.

That guy really seems to have completely lost the plot since leaving City...

Almost asked for a transfer myself after sitting through the game on Sunday. Most disheartening and a hard one to swallow for many reasons, but I'll move on should the club invest the fee wisely - so long Darren and thanks for all the goals.

I have to say some of the coverage of the Bent transfer has been quite amusing to me, you'd have thought we'd just bought a tin of rice pudding for 89 trillion the way folks are harping on. Of course Sunderland supporters are completely entitled to say whatever they want, but the media's snooty contempt for us continues to hover like a bad fart post-Martin O'Neill. Now Martin was mostly great for us and make no mistake, was a big ol' media darling, but come on now, we're not a gang of rats that betrayed our beloved pied piper, he left us, we didn't sack him. I still think Randy should have dealt with the situation a lot better, but still, there it is; a fiasco that became an embarrassment that lead to an avalanche of terror and woe that lasted for...well, its arguably still going on (on the pitch, at least). I'm rambling. Anyway, I like Randy even if his Terrence Malick approach to publicity occasionally works against us, I thank Martin for his four years at the club, and hope Bent does well and that we can keep all of our best players. But as trite as it sounds, we are bigger than any given individual and always have been. Say we're unfashionable, say we're crap to watch but the name over the counter is still worth something (80k a week if reports are to be believed). Villa supporters may come off as whiny, bitter faced drones seething in their own sense of entitlement and...well, okay, its completely true, but don't mock us for suddenly being a bit excited.

This is all directed at Pat Murphy, Oliver Holt, Jim White of Sky Sports News, etc, etc.

We've been used to a certain kind of player around these parts for a lot of years now - you know the type, your classic journeyman. Most of them wilt under the pressure of the fans' expectations (which admittedly, far outweigh the club's own ambitions and in many cases, any vague sense of realism), while the odd one might embrace life as a Sunderland player and gain cult hero status, almost regardless of their actual ability (hello Lionel Perez, Kevin Ball, Nyron Nosworthy and to a lesser extent, Phil Bardsley).

I've never been one for thinking that our little club is the be all and end all, and it's common knowledge that the North East can be a hard sell at the best of times (especially for a London boy) but in Bent, it felt like we finally had ourselves a proven top level player in his prime who had genuinely taken the club to his heart. He always came across as a cut above the stereotypical dozy Premier League footballer, and I regarded him as a true red and white icon for the modern era. Truth is, after his personal hell at Spurs, he was probably just looking for a way to get his career back on track and would have gone anywhere to escape 'Arry and play regular first team football. Currently kicking myself for believing that the lad saw my club as anything other than a stepping stone to better things.

Anyway Fred, I'd like to say that I don't bear Villa any ill will on this. Anyone pointing to our respective league placings is barking up the wrong tree, as it's fairly obvious you'll turn it around sooner or later and, I'd imagine, push for Europe on a more consistent basis than ourselves. We can take solace in the fact that we've got a large fee and a striker in Gyan who we hope can fill Bent's boots. Best of luck for the rest of the season.

You're a class act, Michael and I certainly would never want to come across as smug, nor condescending about your club. Hell, an awful lot of what you just said mirrors my own views about Villa. That being said, I think it would take a lot for me to feel blind sided about any transfer at this point, possibly because every time we sell a player it takes bloody ages, but also because there don't seem to be any players in the Premiership that you can clutch on to as noble exceptions. Its not that the 'olden days' weren't dictated by money as well, its just that the broo ha ha around individual players was much less intense then, whereas now we're fed the same rhetoric from an analogue age at a time when we know much, much better.

I still get surprised by certain managerial sackings, though. Which is silly.

P.S: 10,000 posts in this thread. As Ric Ocasek once said, let the good times roll!

Very true - I'm usually fairly realistic with regard to these things, but I think what caught me off guard was the sheer speed at which it was all done and dusted. We're all getting used to protracted Fabregas-esque transfer sagas simmering in the background for weeks and months - indeed, Bruce, Quinn and Short's very public and somewhat misguided "if we receive a silly offer" policy has had us bracing ourselves for Jordan Henderson's eventual exit for the better part of a year, almost to the point of fans virtually wishing him away just to get it over and done with. This one literally went from a whisper about Bent being unsettled to a done deal in 24 hours - fast work by anyone's standards.

So I guess attention now turns to who'll be coming in. We were already short on numbers with Fraizer Campbell out long-term, and the news that Welbeck will be missing for a further six weeks has turned a pressing concern into an all-out panic. If one of the new faces turns out to be Michael Owen I'll cry.

The pace at which the whole thing happened was indeed bizarre, I came home on Monday evening to a flood of (well, five) e-mails all about us possibly being in for Bent, and then less than 24 hours later I again came home only to find the whole deal complete. Growing up I was more used to watching us mess up signing Juninho, or having to hold a pound sign in protest over Doug's refusal to cough enough money to buy Juan Pablo Angel. Oh Randy, so brash, so fearless!

When Houllier came in I did have a teeny, tiny concern that Owen might surface here, though in reality I'm not sure if even Sven's Leicester would touch 'em. Oh who am I kidding, of course they would.

Speaking of crying, I'll cry tears of joy and laughter should Richard Keys join Andy Gray in being canned by Sky. Keys' self-serving arrogance has long been a source of irritation, while Gray was too busy trotting out the same tired old theories and banal catchphrases to realise that most of them were complete crap-ola even back in 1992. The pair of them are well past their sell-by dates.