But this is the point I was making earlier, we've already got far too many centre midfielders that we're trying to shoehorn into 2 positions. Everyone has complained that Mason was being played out of position, well if we sell Jake we don't have to anymore. We could actually, you know, play centre midfielders in centre midfield and sign wide midfielders to play wide midfield.
This isn't far wrong. If they bid £15m it'd be very hard to argue against accepting the bid. Not that I'm keen to see him go (far from it), but that's a ****load of money which could be very useful - and we DO have cover.
Would we reinvest it though? I don't trust the owners with anything. We need to keep hold of the players we have. If Livermore went, how long until Huddlestone would want out? We'd soon lose a good English core of players.
Precisely. We've got a very imbalanced squad and everyone - I'm guessing - would accept that we're far too top heavy for centre midfielders. We've got (off the top of my head): Mason Jake THudd Clucas (Sterling tells us) Henriksen and Meyler. How many true wide attacking midfielders have we got? Snodgrass and Evandro - is that it? If Silva wants to play 2 central midfielders this bid (if real) gives us a chance to address it. Its not that I want Jake to go, its that this - in my eyes - gives us a chance to address some of the squad imbalance issues we have.
What would we use the 15 million on? This has shades of selling Long and buying Hernandez all over it. It would be so daft to sell Jake.
You don't know that though. For £15m we could comfortably sign Lansbury (£5m) and Ashley Young (£6m). Would that leave us weaker? I'm not saying we should go for those players, it's just an example There's cracking deals to be had in every market.
c He's not playing as a midfielder he's playing as a centre back this season so you'd need to sign a CB and a Winger for the money to get your desired result.... and both would need to be better than what we have now...... [EDIT: GLP beat me to it]
Just how many centre backs do you think we've been playing this past few months? And even if he was we don't need to anyway - we've got Davies, Dawson and Maguire for 2 positions. Edit -GLP didn't beat you to it. He said covers for the defence, not plays in defence.
We'd taken anything between £15m-18m, I think, effectively doubling our money. Would be sad to see him go, always puts in 100%
Lansbury has played for a team in the Championship for the last 4 seasons. I know what you are saying, I'm not saying you're wrong. I think it's the wrong time to consider selling a known quantity for someone of unknown quantity in our team, our current predicament and the amount of games we have remaining. I do think we have to retain our current squad members and add into areas of weakness. Minimum disruption is called for in my opinion. Add a RB add another striker and then go with what we've got.
