Like any other football fan up and down the length and breadth of the country, we will all be sitting around the SSN and BBC websites etc over the next 30 hours hoping, waiting and praying for a breakthrough in the transfer market. Cisse, Defoe, Bellamy, Crouch, Helmes et al, are amongst man others currently being waved around the forums and websites for the past week or so and to be honest, any one or a combination of a couple would be fantastic. However, having a bit crack at the weekend with the lads, over a few swills after watching the match on Saturday, and we got tom talking about what we need. We all threw a few names into the hat but the really interesting thing was how many times we kept saying things like we need a Kevin Phillips, Niall Quinn or Marco up front and a Joe Bolton/John Kay/Makin for full backs and a Kevin Ball as captain etc etc. We need a Johnson and Summerbee combination on the wings, a Benno/Elliot at the back and a Lord Rowell superstar local lad. Now, there's nowt wrong with that until one of the lads said you know what, we just need to stay clear of big name signings and money grabbing players up here in the NE and concentrate on maybe the lower leagues and hungry, ambitious players. All of the above cost bugger all to be fair, even taking into account the difference in currencies but all of the above would walk into our club. Who would you have between SKP and Gyan for instance - no competition IMO. Only Quinny was a high profile signing as nearly all the others when they were signed were total unknowns. I have often come on here and the old 606 to say similar things then as a football fan, you get sucked in to thinking that you have to spend and spend to be successful. We have had some fantastic players at our club over the years only the problem being not all at the same time. Big names dont seem to work up here for us for some reason. Take Gyan. Great lad, great player and world class footballer but he has already started to look uninterested IMO and talk of his agent negotiating a move over the summer just shouldn't have been there. None of the players mentioned above (with the exception of SKP after 5 years at the club) want ed to leave and after another relegation, who could blame him. We made him but also cost him many England caps too IMO, as we didn't build on the success he brought to make SAFC a bigger profile club. A problem we still suffer from today. All in all, I guess what I am trying to say is far form putting down some of the players that we may get or are linked with, its worth remembering that at the time we signed Marco, Bally, Benno or SKP for example, none of us would have wanted them but all of them are legends of the club today. Big names sometimes mean big headaches and big ego's to control and above all, ridiculous wage demands. Maybe we should concentrate on the lesser lights more and give them a real chance to shine in the red & whites. A team of Benno's & Ballys would scare the ****e out of opposition players with a sprinkling of SKP's, Rowells, and Marco they could be awesome as a unit. Football is a team game and always will be. Maybe a 'team' is what we want not individuals making up an 11. Good old fashioned bread and butter signings that give their all and want to play for the club. Anyone agree?
Spot on scatty. Did Marco or SKP (who was a far, far better footballer AND goal scorer as well BTW) bring us any pain really? They cost less than £500k between them to buy and gave us some of our finest memories.
The problem is for me, is unearthing the gems from the crud, its not often a player like Phillips comes along, and most promising players from the lower leagues go for crazy cash these days Wallcot, Wickham, Oxlaide-Chamberlain, Ashley Young to Villa, Smaling, to name just a few. There are not that many unknowns that get a chance of the big time, unless they come up with the team they are playing for, not sure if thats just because they are not good enough, or we all rely on Foriegn players/youth acadamy too much (youth acadamy isnt a bad thing though). I also think these days, if you want to compete, which after all is the whole point of football, you have to get the big names, they do not always work, but then a team of unknowns very rarely work (to compete i mean, they may set the world alight, then be in a relegation battle at the end, and more than likely plummet through the trapdoor). Nice Dream, but i just feel the game itself has moved on from the K Phillips days, and its a lot harder to make the step up to the big time, than it used to be. PS: K phillips handed in 3 transfer requests, 2 with Reid and 1 with Wilkinson I believe, they were refused, but he still handed them in.
I admire the sentiment C'est, but... SNQ cost us a lot of money - relatively speaking. So did Dave Watson. Go back to when we were MASSIVE - Trevor Ford, Len Shackleton. We have always had to augment the solid ones with players not made here. We had to sign Ball, Phillips, Baxter, HURLEY, Buchan, etc, etc. I like the theory, but lets be real. We can pick a free side over the last 50 years, but always need a bought in element. Ian Porterfield came from Raith.... Lovely idea. x
Bloody hell Cest when I said I usually enjoyed reading your posts, I wasn't expecting a novel each time! Saying that, yep, I agree with your sentiments.
Just a few things, apart from Phillips who of the players went onto bigger or better things? Marco? Not really. Bally - no. Makin? Rowell? Don't get me wrong with the exception of Rowell I loved all those players, I was more a Stan Cummings fan and was little when Rowell played so I can't really comment on his football (he's crap on the radio, and seems clueless though) so were we not the pinnicale for mos tof these players? Bally,
sorry I seem to have posted that 1st bit by accident. Let us not forget, Steve Bould who was cheap and the best centre half I've seen at Sunderland, Niall Quinn the best forward I've seen at Sunderland, sTEFAN sCHWARZ, big names thrown into that team. What did Johnston ever do after us? Didn't he get greedy. I remember Phillips and Sorenson still wanted loyalty bonuses paid by the club even when we looked like going out of business under murray. So for every ying there is a yang, however what I will ask is are we looking at the lower leagues? Liverpool built a generation of success on this premise, is it unfashionable to sign a crewe player these days or non-league player - it seems everything has to be from abroad? most of us oo and arrr at potention foreign signings but I would suggest that is from hope rather than belief, however if the same 6-7 million was spent on a Burnley left back fans would probably complain, maybe the game has gone more global, perhaps we spend a fortune on foreign scouts and nothing in our own back yard. Scatty moo I suggest Bent was a great signing and that as a club we should have done more to keep him. I you look at the team Bent scored goals in and the team that Phillips scored goals in I'd go Bent.
There's no point in having a footballer made from bread and butter you silly man, they'll just fall apart! I'll get me coat...
Plus what did these players ever achieve??? With the exception of Phillips (who I would still suggest had his best times at Sunderland) I also mean what did they ever achieve at Sunderland? John Byrne got us to a cup final, would you take him over Gyan today?
There's a lot of truth in what Cest says, but I think half the problem is the fact that we seem to leave everything until late in the transfer window. Why are we only buying strikers now? I appreciate that a lot of our targets will have been waiting to see what offers come in and we may have made an approach some time ago, but if Bruce has scouted our new Korean lad properly then he's had time to look over a bloke half a world away. Why the rush into Germany (if the reports are true) now? I suspect that if we pick up some decent players at this stage they'll only be marking time until a better offer comes in. It's what Bent did and we've seen it before at the mags, with players like Viduka. We need players who want to play for us and who see us as a real step up, not a bit of a sideways move while they re-launch their career in the public glare of the EPL.
Good post Cestria...As you say, football is a team game, and sometimes it reminds me of a jig-saw puzzle, where that final little piece makes all the difference when looking at the big picture.
