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The 'Angel of Ogbonna' is 34 years old, 'Les Dawson' is 32 and Fabian Balbuena has left the club, so there would appear to be a centre back crisis, with there being only two ageing incumbents. Obviously two centre backs are not enough, especially as neither one is a spring chicken.

The murky world of football finances has always been 'mudded' by strange accountancy terms that leave the layman baffled and that is exactly the intention. The most common term most people read is the ubiquitous "undisclosed' fee, when clubs reveal, or in most cases don't reveal the actual fee paid for a player.

The expression cracked record doesn't mean much to a 'soshall' media driven audience nowadays, even a 'blipping CD' has become a passé expression, so perhaps an Xbox digital glitch or server outage is more of a 'current' term. Whatever phrase you care to use, it wouldn't be far off describing West Ham United's pursuit of 'fresh legs' for what is an ageing and wafer thin squad.