True but he'll fall into a good (better) job soon enough. I'm surprised a German team didn't snap him up before to be honest. Must be a number of Championship teams keeping tabs on his availability too.
Anybody else looking forward to watching NCFC playing on Quest again? Let’s see who will/might leave this summer: Williams will Gilmour will Normann might kabak will Aarons might Cantwell will I might seem a bit early to speculate about players, but I think we all agree that we can say goodbye to the EPL for another season.
Might be worth starting a summer transfer thread although there are still a few games to go / lose. Be my guest
Zoe Ward (SW’s wife) has joined the board of Directors. It’s worth noting that she has been with the club a while and prior to SW arriving.
Twitter ITK thinks this is part of Webber's thinking shifting towards a longer term role with NCFC. He turned down Everton apparently. Honestly, if he leaves now his stock is probably the lowest it's been in 3-4 years, so not too surprised that he'd be open to staying longer, getting through the end of the pandemic then looking for a bigger role abroad.
He is taking a lot of abuse on social media at the moment but to the same people he was the messiah 12months that ago. I like Webber and I think he has done a lot of great things for the club especially around the infrastructure. I would personally be happy if he stays longer term.
He has a lot to answer for over the two PL seasons though. This season especially, with the money we have wasted on players who aren't good enough/ not even played or both. Rashica has showed up, but Sargent, Gibson, Giannoulis, Tzolis, Lees-Melou have all been below average. Lees-Melou, might be the only one of those to have salvaged SOME pride, more recently. Best part of £32m on the other 4! Best we (and Webber) can hope for from these signings is that they are yet another group who are too good for the Championship. Then hope that the likes of Sargent and Tzolis improve enough for the PL in the future.
What concerns me about the recruitment isn't that individual players have disappointed - that can always happen. It's that in retrospect there seems to be little overall planning regarding the recruitment as a whole. Why no DM? Why the focus on wingers unless we were thinking of changing Pukki on his own up front? Did we assume that Idah would be used in the way that Smith used him before his injury? If so, why wasn't he played that way from the start? If you say Farke's stubbornness, then that raises the question whether Farke had much of a role to play in deciding who would and wouldn't be bought. Did Farke buy into the idea in theory but not buy into it in practice? Why did we buy Sargent? As a striker who could hold up the ball? But he clearly can't do that - he doesn't have the necessary ball control. As a sort of winger-striker-midfielder who could help us play a pressing game? If so, why didn't we press very hard? I said 'in retrospect' at the start because I have to admit that I was very happy with Webber's recruitment at the time, so I wanted to make it clear that it's easy to be smart in hindsight. But looking back now, I just cannot see any logic or structure to the business we did, especially the lack of someone to do the kind of job that Skipp did. And I don't buy the idea that this was meant to be Normann, because if you look at him play it's clear that he doesn't want to play that role even if he is (may be?) capable of it. Like so much of this season, it just seems a mess. Like the way we play now, no sign of any larger strategic thinking at all.
I don’t actually think we can be too critical of the recruitment - Tzolis was always one for the future and Sargent is also really young as well as showing sparks (and frustrations), Giannoulis and Gibson were clearly top level Championship standard and a risk going into the Premier League so there had to be a decent chance they wouldn’t cut it. Given the number of games they’ve each played you can’t really class any a failure of the Ricky can Wolfswinkel order. They have just fallen short of Premier League standard as have we as a club - they could all still come good next season.
I think Tzolis could rival RvW at this point. He's young, sure, but more expensive and at least Ricky was in the first team picture for his first season. I think part of the frustration with recruitment is how close to good it's been, and actually how small the margins are between us going down and staying up. As individuals, nobody really looks like a terrible signing, but we just needed one or two more to prove to be Premier League ready now, rather than perhaps in a couple of years. That and a coherent gameplan they fit into... We've played dreadfully for most of the season, and still been much closer to survival than last time.
Normann was being tracked and targeted well before the summer. As I've said many times before, I don't think Farke ever really wanted a specialist DM. With Buendia gone, DF was more concerned about creating chances than not allowing them, and the attraction of Normann was his ability to move the ball forward quickly. Remember all that pre-season nonsense about a midfield three "sharing" and "rotating" the DM role? All this was documented in Michael Bailey's article on Normann's signing in The Athletic, including an illuminating comparison between Normann and Skipp. Ollie Skipp contributed little to our play going forward. What DF wanted was a Skipp replacement who contributed more to our attacking play. None of the midfielders in whom we showed interest , e.g. Billings, were specialist DMs. Gilmour's loan was all part of the same thinking. Tuchel ideally wanted him to get experience playing in a "double 8" (c.f. Jorginho/Kovacic or Jorginho/Kante for Chelsea). DF's idea was, in effect, a "triple 8", with DM-like duties in possession passing from one to the other depending on which of them was involved in developing the attacking play. Stuart Webber isn't responsible for our specific style of play. Should Farkeball actually be referred to as Webberball? Our summer recruitment was aimed at building a squad to play as Farke wanted them to play in this new, Emi-less, era. Farke didn't want a specialist DM, so Webber didn't sign one.
I think some posters need to be more realistic with their expectations. Look what Harry Kane was like when he was loaned to us.
I think that’s too harsh on Tzolis to be honest - RvW was brought in to lead our line. Tzolis wasn’t even expected to be a starting option. I am also not sure we have played dreadfully ALL season… there were one or two matches in there early on where we played really quite nicely, including of course against Bournemouth. The positive PL games that stick in the memory are Leicester and Brentford.
I still think the covid disruption and our early fixtures knocked the stuffing out of us. As people have said so many of the signings have been nearly fantastic. Will they pay off in 2022/23 and 23/24? A lot of them are still young.
I'm pretty sure that had we got four strugglers to begin with then we would have had those five points on the board early on. Farke wouldn't have been sacked and, although we were always going to be in the mix , we wouldn't have been nailed on certs for the drop.
