Slow down Stirling, I've barely gotten over us missing out on Tim Cahill and James Beattie.

Now Zaha's got a bit of green grass ahead of him here... and finds Ambrose... not a bad effort!!!!

If he is NOT, he won't be under consideration.
Experienced, over 600 league games, has ploughed his furrow in the PL.

Edited by Willo (11 Jan 2023 4.56pm)

He'll fit right in.

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

While Willo is on one level technically correct, he's using the lazy English that we frequently employ to mislead ourselves towards a conclusion we want to believe (and Willo, I'm not trying to admonish you here; as you say, we agree about Bannan's nonimpact at Palace).

Bannan has NOT played 86 games in the PL. More accurately, he has played IN 86 games. There's a big difference.

Over five seasons in the PL, he has played a total of 4650 minutes, many of those appearances coming off the bench. If you divide 4650 by 90, you might reasonably say he's played 51 games in the PL. Coming over 5 seasons, that averages out to 10 games a season while he'd been employed by PL sides. Put another way, he's never really been anything more than a bit-part player. To underline this, his most "productive" season in the top flight saw him play 1627 minutes; amounting to 18 games, less than half the games Villa (his club at the time) played that year.

As I said originally, Bannan is little more than a cult figure. The evidence simply doesn't come close to supporting the myth that he's ever been either a productive or influential player. At PL level he averages ten games, 0.2 goals, and 0.2 assists a season. And some people think we miss him. Really?

Edited by sydtheeagle (11 Jan 2023 6.28pm)

Sydenham by birth. Selhurst by the Grace of God.

WTF is it with you and ploughing furrows today, Willo? I know some of our strikers have been a bit agricultural over the years, but really, do we need another one of those?

Sydenham by birth. Selhurst by the Grace of God.

I watched Sheffield Wednesday quite a lot on TV a few years ago mainly because I liked Bannan. I thought that he was their best player for many seasons and was surprised that there was never a sniff of any other club trying to buy him so I was obviously missing something that others could see