Richie McCormack

It's a mental illness as they used to regard it back in the day, but yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, you see Liverpool fans almost reminiscing about the time they signed Fabinho, which was a signing that came out of the clear blue sky.

Nobody had, to the best of my knowledge, nobody had flagged this in advance to say, oh, by the way, Liverpool are looking at a defensive midfielder.

There's a lad at Monaco who looks like he would fit their criteria.

They're looking at a range of options.

There was nothing like that.

It was like a Thursday night.

I think I was working the sports desk at the time.

And it's like Liverpool had paid 40 million to Monaco or whatever it was for Fabinho.

And everyone's like, all right, this is like harking back to back in the day when, you know, you'd refresh the Teledex page or you'd pick up the back page of a newspaper and that would be the first you'd hear of a potential move.

But the modern era has changed all that and the transfer...

And the player has already played out in your mind before they've actually even put pen to paper on Anthon.

So today we already know what Jean-Philippe Mateta is going to look like in a Nottingham Forest jersey.

We already know what Jürgenstrand Larsson is going to look like in a Palace jersey and all that kind of stuff.

And back in the day you kind of had to let your imagination run wild if at all you got that little bit of a glimpse behind the curtain and

Yeah, the greatest Photoshopping job ever done was that picture of the Republic of Ireland squad that was taken at Lansdowne Road, but...

about seven or eight members of the squad were missing so they genuinely did get ringers in and this picture was used on people who probably still have it somewhere at home it was used on club or what are they called call cards and it was used as posters but there's a lot of them are very identifiably not that person but their head has been superimposed onto it so i'm not going to give away which supermarket were giving away that poster but i definitely had that when i was a kid

I think the Villa cohort were among those.

Ray, yeah.