I hope you don’t mind me calling you by your first name already, but we’re all mates here at St Andrews.

First of all, I’m not sure whether it should be congratulations or commiserations on getting the Blues job, given the ‘backing’ of the board. You seem a decent enough bloke although not exactly charismatic and there are, of course, rumours that your style of football bored even the Middlesbrough fans and that when things weren’t going right at Forest you jumped ship.

However, these are just rumours and if you can turn us into a solid and robust outfit which doesn’t have us biting our nails on the last day of the season then we will be eternally grateful.

Talking of rumours, we’ve already heard a lot about new signings, although that’s mainly due to the local paper rehashing the same old stories to the point of mind-numbing boredom. To be frank, we definitely need a new keeper (maybe two), another central defender, two wingers and one or maybe two forwards. The only thing we don’t need is yet another central midfielder…but I guess you’ve worked that out already.

No doubt Chairman Dong has given you only enough money to buy a couple of takeaways, so best of luck in going down the route of frees/out of contract players.

Regards,

Andy