Navel gazing at some stats from https://www.whoscored.com/Teams/316/Show/England-Northampton ; our style of player is pretty good from a football purist perspective. 6th in possession, 6th for number of short passes per game, 14th for long balls per game, 7th for Crosses. So, we have a lot of the ball and we mix it up, but we keep it on the ground a lot more than most League 1 teams. Which is just as well as nobody outside the back 5 can win a header, if we are to bring an attacker in, it needs to be someone who is at least semi-competent of that side of the game to mix it up. Appere is good at playing a good through ball and playing a pass, but weak at holding on to it and winning aerial battles. Simpsons is good at dribbling and long shots, but bad at staying offside and aerial battles again. Hondermarck and Sowerby are both also marked at being poor at Aerial battles, and it's not a strength for McWilliams or Leonard either (though Leonard is described at good at pretty much everything else). Fortunately the defence is very good at dealing with them, but it's a major weakness offensively.

Likewise, while this is a bit sad to say, Burge is a 3rd highest rated player and Thompson is our 2nd worst, so there should be a big improvement once Burge is back in the sticks.

https://www.northamptonchron.co.uk/sport/football/cobblers-to-benefit-after-chelsea-complete-deal-for-young-midfielder-from-aston-villa-3791603

Maybe they are yet to land.
#runningcosts

Am I being mental, and isn't this money from a year ago now? Last two previous years published accounts showed we only broke even AFTER raising money from Goode sales, so I'd assume this money would have already been used last year's budget to keep us on an even keel.

Faith it'll come good as long as we keep it up.

Yeah, the website is completely made up. Only concrete info will be two years out of sate from accounts, which you could probably extrapolate from a little research. If you used to other teams accounts to work out rougly what percentage of staffinga costs is non-playing staff, you could get fairly accurate figures for the two years back.

I'd be interested to know how we compete with our peers in Shrewsbury, Exeter and Cambridge, and why Carlisles is so low when theyre getting 10k fans.

Unless he's amazing, cant see the benefit of doing that.

We do have 3 rbs, but even he's played League one football a fair bit so far. Even as he was the rumoured exit before, couldnt guess who the other two are.

If Haynes and Hylton are injured, going to be difficult to get buyers, unless the 3 our are youngsters? Not many other surplus to requirements.

I think everyone agrees we're light on top. But also to be realistic and say that when Exeter get almost £800k for a player, you've just got to admit that puts it out of a control. And the downsize of keeping the squad together is that we've spent all summer with little slack to bring anyone in.

Exeter lost their star player to big money which allowed them to take him, I'm not too surprised by that giving them the edge.
Would people have been happy if we'd sold Hoskins or even Pinnock and brought in Muskwe in loan as a replacement?

Edit: They've also been linked to Nicke Kabamba, which might actually be a worse signing than us actually having brought Tete Yengi back.

Apparently Challinor is the man for Charlton, so dont need to worry about Brady yet.

If we've maxed our budget out, it's an interesting way to spend it, but can't say he hasn't earned it.

I'm sure we've already had bids for him. But I cant imagine we'd sell for less than Goode money.

Game of two halves so far.

"Mitch Pinnock’s hopeful, and to be fair hopeless, high hoof into the Posh penalty area in the 90th minute forced goalkeeper Nicholas Bilokapic to back pedal. There was a fumble and his feet certainly appeared to travel beyond the goalline, but whether or not the ball did is another matter, although an assistant who was not in line showed no hesitation in awarding the goal."

Swanny as graceful in defeat as he is in victory.

Anyone else s*** and not good enough for League 1? Seems to be going well for us so far.

CHEER UP ALLLANN SWANNNN

Mmm, well i don't doubt their budget will be much larger than ours till, I don't the gap will be as big as in other years. I think Wigan might make better candidates for that top 8 than Peterborough. They have ownership issues where they're having to sell the best players to deal with a demand for £6 million that one of the co-owners wants repaid ASAP, though some of them are still with them. Budget aisde, they've had a great start, and are especially dangerous down the right, so Brough and Monthe will have to step up big-time, and they're going to be easy favourites... but derbies have always been a great leveller in football.

Pinnock does the difficult things well in a way that no-one else can. Tries outrageous things... quite often they don't work out at all, and it feels like he messed up the easy stuff like a simple pass, but who has a bit of flair for this level which we'd miss. Creates the second most key passes out of the team outside Leonard. I hope after having experience of getting good fees for players at last, like Goode etc, we'd only be considering this is it was a REALLY good bid. Not a Toney/Jacobs situation.

On an unrelated note though, listening to the football Ramble this morning to catch up from Monday, and they talked about how good Brighton are at replacing their players when they get pinched, and to show how well they are on top of understanding data an online football scouting data analytics site put in all the data for Caicedo in to find the nearest replacement based on stats, performances, passing data etc in the entire footballing league, and result was Marc Leonard. Obviously the point was how on the ball Brighton already are with understanding analytics to build their team as they already own the direct replacement in their conveyor belt, but when you have the same profile as a £110million pound player, maybe the stats team in Northampton aren't too badly either.

I think for us Peterborough is very much the only real agreed Derby, while they have a few more options, but I would expect the majority of Posh fans (other than maybe early 20s and below) would consider us to be #1 and Cambridge #2. Quick google spat out these results, https://fanbanter.co.uk/the-top-five-rivals-of-english-footballs-top-92-clubs-revealed/ - With us about 3% points ahead of Cambridge.

We haven't played MK enough due to their small time in existance for them to be a derby for me, I'd categorise them in the same pot as Oxford, and probably Bristol Rovers, in that there's a little bit of needle, but absolutely no chance of being an actual derby where I'd care what they were doing or take joy if they were to say bottle the play-offs.

League two Hoskins and non league Appere with the goals.