It says Martinez had always wanted him. Why? What possible qualities did he really possess? It's another saga that tells the world how useless we have been at finding real talent, when we brought in rubbish like this.

Now I just feel very depressed. When is the transfer window going to open so we can put our weight behind the next big game-changer?

As others have said, no athlete and best suited to football from 30 years ago (or Division 3) where a winger could neglect defending and have a rest every 5 minutes.

Some wingers would fare better with two target men to aim for in the middle, I don't think that would have made a difference for Aiden.

For Wigan.

Niasse probably did well(-ish) because his all-action, haphazard style presumably confused the hell out of defences used to coping with tidy footballers like Hleb, Zhirkov, Arshavin and Bilyaletdinov (albeit inferior versions).

It's hard to think of many Russians (as distinct from Ukranians) who have flourished in a major league. Conclusion: stop signing players from the Russian league unless (like Malcom) they've already shown they can cut it in Western Europe.

Bernard is our top earner on around £120k per week and is a rotation player.

Sandro was a cheap clause – and we still have him.

McGeady got 4½ years on £60k. If we were actually buying him, I reckon it would have been less wages and a shorter contract.

Jermaine Beckford was a relative success for a free.

Are there any others we've been stung by?

Aside from the comings and goings he discusses, things to note are the fact that all players in Russia smoke and that our late Roberto Martinez didn't half love to flannel his players

Link

There's a few more who we probably all have mixed feelings about, eg, Sigurdsson, Mina, Pickford, Keane and Bernard. Everyone else (apart from young lads bought a while ago for peanuts) have looked like expensive (fee and / or wages) mistakes.

No-one yet knows for sure which category Kean and Iwobi fall in but I am confident that there are dozens of players around Europe who would have delivered much more for a lower fee.

Martinez said he had ‘de-trained' during the few weeks before he arrived. What that revealed for me was a poor attitude and a lack of ambition. We should have sent him packing. For me, the arrival of this joker was the beginning of Martinez's rapid decline as a respected manager.

People always think it's worth a gamble, but then we're stuck with them for ages if it doesn't work out.

As for others, didn't we sign Lucas Neill on a free and then sell him shortly afterwards?

A great piece of business thinking and a profit of around quarter of a million I think. Doubtless the Board member who engineered it was subsequently removed for being a smart arse and not thinking in the Everton way.

Saw that video of Beckford's goal over on Twitter the other day, someone commented along the lines of, "Never has a player mis-controlled a ball the entire length of the pitch and still slotted it home so calmly."

At that point we should have wrapped him in cotton wool and sold him for £10M – only joking, by the way.

Turned out a huge disappointment (McGeady, not Joe), couldn't really cope with the Premier League and didn't look like he wanted to. I haven't heard him speak well of us since he went, even though we gave him the big stage.

Flattered to deceive, I always had the impression – I could be wrong – that he thought he was a better player than he was.