Suggest Johnson might want to focus heavily on the defence considering the amount of mistakes we made, especially Fielding, and the sheer number of goals we conceded especially in the second half of the season following the drubbing at Villa.
It really is a crock of old horse muck, it's cost Bristol City £500k for Ryan Kent from Liverpool, with all of the other dead beats we have paid good money for recently we must be mugs, it stinks. https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/sport...eds-united-rangers-interested-signing-1648421
I never rated him. Good close control skills but greedy, with no end product. Constantly ran into traffic, ultimately losing the ball. We didn’t have time for him to develop - as a loan player he should be able to hit the ground running - but he didn’t and we dropped him - quite correctly in my book. A contract which forces clubs to play crap loan players or be fined should never be signed. Imagine if we had had the same contract with Diony - or the bloke from Fulham who played so rarely I can’t remember his name!!!
I'd understand why a club loaning out a player would want a clause like this - they want to guarantee that the kid they're sending out is actually getting game time which is conducive to their development, otherwise they may as well stay at their parent club and train with their own first-teamers. Obviously, to the loanee club it's a negative, but if there're a lot of rival clubs competing for a player they think could make a difference then they may decide it's a risk worth taking; after all, if the player is supposedly good enough to improve your first team, it ought not to apply... Unfortunately with Kent, it didn't work out. It's easy for us to judge in hindsight, but at the time he was highly rated by Liverpool and had spent time played in the Bundesliga in Germany, so it seemed like a bit of a coup - he was almost certainly more high-profile than Tammy Abraham was before he joined us. When it became apparent he wasn't contributing what we wanted, the club would've been slaughtered if they'd started him ahead of other, more worthy players, just to get out of a fine...
He was loaned out to Freiburg for the season on the last day of the 2017/2018 summer transfer window.After making just six appearances, Kent's loan spell at Freiburg was terminated and he returned to parent club Liverpool on 8th January. We signed him on the 12th January, did anybody enquire why he had played only 6 times in 5 months if he had such star quality, why was his contract terminated at Friburg, would you authorize an agreement to pay a £5ook penalty clause with a player with such recent history as that, we have payed out £50k per match plus his wages and costs for a complete failure. 10 Championship appearances and 1 league cup, no goals, substituted I don't honestly know how many times. With other recent examples of our signings and loans to me it is a complete farce, I'll say it again we must be mugs and it stinks, someone should suffer the consequences.
I didn’t know that he only played 6 games for Freiburg. Perhaps we should have sent him back to Liverpool as soon as he couldn’t make the first team then.
Maybe he didn’t settle in Germany? Also based on his Barnsley loan last season being their player of the season had a lot to do with it. Me personally think that he just wasn’t interested and it showed in his performance. I put the first appearance down to he only joined the day before. We can beat the club up all we want, but at the end of the day he had a good reputation but did not work here. It could of been worse we could of payed Liverpool’s valuation of him and been left with a lemon.
Remarkably little about his time with us i. This article which suggests he doesn’t want it publicised! He may develop into a star (like Danny Rose - who was awful for us) - but we didn’t have time to wait.
Definitely not a good deal, but I don't recall you identifying him as a phony at the time he signed. Granted, our scouting team should be much better informed than us & this is a black spot against them, but I don't think it's cause to call for somebody's head to roll. As I said, at the time, it was seen as a coup & even a sign of progress/ambition. I'm personally not a huge fan of loan signings, unless it's to cover for injuries or someone truly special. We were hoping for the latter but end up with expensive dead weight.
Got to be honest, how could I pass comment on Ryan,I had never heard of the bloke, I have never said or thought Ryan was or is a phoney, it was a **** awful signing, it was a massive mistake, a wrong decision and a financial balls up, that signing individually was terrible, combined with the other 2 January signings, woeful, add that to the other non performers, Engvall and Woodrow it seems idiotic. I am not looking for heads to roll, I think someone should be responsible for and take the consequences, something is amiss in the scouting, planning and decision makers, some sort of changes needs to happen. Let me be clear before people start to make false allegations towards me, I am not advocating any get LJ out thinking, we need to shake up certain people in the suits department who seem to be getting complacent and are getting away with it
I take your point , but for balance the same people brought amongst others Tammy , Kodjia , Odowda , and to a degree Fam as well , some would maybe say too many bad decisions have been made but there has been some good ones too. If you take young players with potential it’s inevitable some will not turn out as expected , the hope is the ones that do will make up for the ones that don’t and to be fair I think we’ve had, on balance enough successes to outweigh the failures you outlined.
Spot on. When Kent played his first game for us (easily his worst for us as well imo), I tweeted about him playing badly, mainly in jest. I had replies and 'likes' from fans of Barnsley and German fans of Freiburg, all with an 'I told you so' attitude. Probably a very good player, but until he gets a brain he will just end up as a Theo Walcott of the Championship.
Business as usual down the Gate then. Lets squander half a million by not reading/understanding the implications of the bloke not playing a certain amount of games. Amateurs
I don't think the issue was that they weren't aware of it. Not playing him ahead of more deserving players must've seemed like the least ****ty of two options.
to be honest, if a club has to many players to fit in with their plans they should be glad that someone has them for a season.... even pay them to! PREM CLUBS have something like 900 or more on their books they could supply all the players for the champs and div1 ( ok some might be 17 -18 years old ) by having major grabs on "the better talent" it means that these players are "out of the game" players in all divisions below fielding most of the best of the rest …….
