Is McCartney one of Gold's Fab Four?

Last week Gold said we should expect four new signings and it was unclear if Jussi and Diame counted in that number. The immediate reaction was, even if it was four on top of those two, it still wasn't enough - and I was assuming McCartney was already in the bank! God help us if McCartney is number three and we can only expect one further signing!

It is very worrying that Sullivan and Gold appear to be trying to do this on the cheap. The team that secured promotion is not good enough for the Prem and the squad is woefully ill equipped to cope with the increased demands. Without question, we need two full backs, a centre back, a forward and a wide, attacking midfielder. That's five players AFTER the signing of Jussi, Diame and McCartney.

The fixture list has thrown up a number of winnable fixtures early doors. We need, therefore, to sign players sooner rather than later so they are available for the early fixtures, rather than joining the stupid scramble at the end of the transfer window, having lost vital points due to the delay.

Quite why we allowed Reading to pick up Pavel Pogrebnyak on a free is completely beyond me. I hope we don't live to regret it, with the Russian scoring a Reading winner on the last day of the season so sending us down!

It's time for a reality check at West Ham. We scraped our way to promotion and without significant investment, we will struggle to stay up.