McCarthy and Walcott - both fantastic people, two of the nicest characters in football. If something changes in the next few weeks, no issues. Experienced players - we have Nathan, JWP, Jan Bednarek, Oriol Romeu. It's not always about experience, it's about are they going to make the team better. Broja was great when he came as he could score a goal from no chance - "it's just a pity he didn't do it for the whole season for whatever reasons". Proven goalscorers cost 40-60m. We need to concede less as much as anything else. We need outstanding defensive qualities and we have conceded too many. Ralph agrees, we need a "special guy" up front.
While I appreciate and like our strategy re signing young players, I don't like hearing that this is our strategy from Semmens on the one hand, while Ralph is basically saying that it will take time for younger players to adapt and therefore it wasnt appropriate to play them against Spurs. That may well be true, but we needed some players that could come straight in and if you don't believe they can then maybe we shouldn't be making our transfer strategy exclusively developing players. I am glad it is our priority, but there still needs to be some flexibility. Semmens did also say that they would sign what we need (or words to that effect), but the reality doesn't seem to match that, pending the activity between now and the window ending of course.
Re fan stuff in the Itchen - "what you see as a heavy handed approach is us reacting to what we're being told to do by the FA and Premier League".
"When we're playing five at the back, why do we decide to play players like Djenepo who aren't capable" "Because my left back has only been back in training for two weeks for the first game. So my only option was Moussa, who played some good games in pre-season." Pretty obvious really.
That fan is an idiot. Mainly for his pronunciation of "Perraud" but also ignorant of the fact he's just coming back from a bad injury.
"When we go in front, we concede two or three - what can we do about our fragile mental state? We're lacking a bit of leadership" "Very good question. It's definitely something we have been discussing. The Villa game last season was a mind blower for us....one game can cause you so many issues that you completely lose the ability to play successfully, which for me was surprising and hard to analyse. I'm not a fan of putting it down to less experience. Around players are going things that you never know as a manager. Agents are coming, other clubs are coming. I had the feeling, especially with Broja, some of the young players are flying and suddenly forget how to win games in the PL. It's not about changing the shape, it's about the mindset, and we were really struggling at the end of the season to get that back, and that's absolutely my responsibility."
"Some young players still have more steps to climb the next mountain. There will be more mistakes, and that will be hard for me and for you."
I think that was answered fairly reasonably, but the fan had a point about there being real issues with away fans getting tickets in the home section and that being a trigger for trouble and I am not sure there was really any response to it.
