Yes Mike, now that you come to mention it I realise that replying to you with 'I do get what you're saying but to some extent that's always going to be the case isn't it?' was massively inflammatory of me and the type of thing that could only have provoked an argument, even with someone like you who would do anything to avoid one.
You were saying we'd 'lost' half of last years squad and so it wasn't like we'd actually built on the squad from last year, we'd just 'replaced like for like'. My point from the off was just that player trading is normal; we didn't 'lose' Young, Harrison, Lindstrom, Broja etc, we let them go because we decided we could do better, and it's not 'like for like' when you're bringing in a £35m player to replace a barrel scraping loan, or bringing in someone with a £50m option to buy to replace a bloke who we could no doubt have had on loan again with no outlay if we'd wanted to, or buying a new striker for £28m to replace the one who'd scored 17 goals in his last 4 seasons. You said we 'needed' to spend £100m just to be able to put a team out, and all I'm saying is that that isn't true, we chose to spend £100m on the players we did, when we could very easily have filled the gaps in the squad for much cheaper. If you just worded your post poorly then yeah we're not really disagreeing, but I'm not sure how i'm supposed to know that what you write isn't what you mean.
. Behave
