The club have not covered themselves in glory this past couple of days, and cant even get its Green credentials right. They don't seem to understand that to get to NetZero they are supposed to cut down on private jets not send them out and come back with NetZero passengers Liam Cooper was 31 this week, Ayling and Forshaw are also 31yo, and so too is Dallas and we also have Klich at 32yo. Whatever happens this season fans are going to have to get used to not having these players representing the club and it may well be that this is their last season. This means more surgery required next summer even if the rest of the present squad are still here. Cresswell, Drameh and Bate could replace Klich and Cooper and Ayling but another DM and AM required. That would be the cheapest solution but could be 5 new players required just to stand still? We have 10 players out on loan and we need to keep an eye on them because some maybe coming back. Cresswell started off on fire but has had a couple of average games and is now settling in and isnt a nailed on starter. Roberts is always injured so fans dont know what to make of him. Shackelton seems to be a starter though so far. Costa will not be back as he in reality is sold and we get paid in June. Lewis Bate seems to be spending lots of time on the bench, McKinstry will probably not be back so compensation due from Motherwell and Jenkins will also probably not be coming back so compensation due there too. Poveda will end up elsewhere, maybe another season loan somewhere unless a settlement deal is negotiated because he will want a freebie. Bogusz and James are done. In real terms the only players coming back are Cresswell and Bate The Cody Gakpo debacle highlights a massive problem at our club. We could have signed Gakpo when CDK opted for Milan. We didnt and by the time we went in for him it was too late. Comments from Kinnear about having 3 strikers who were better than most prem clubs have was shown to be bollox. Yes Rodrigo has been great this season but only 5 games in and now injured. Bamford hasnt been fit since he joined the England squad and isnt fit yet, and Joffy is still learning but hardly played. Embarrassing from the club who have learnt nothing from last Summer. Brereton-Diaz would have been a good move earlier in the window but they took a gamble right until the window was closing. He wanted to come but Blackburn wanted £25m for a player in the last year of his contract, greed and will now probably lose him on a free. If stories are true we went elsewhere like Wolves again for Hwang, Piroe and Iheanacho and ended up with a last gasp sprint for little willie. Still on the subject of strikers, I believe Gelhardt starts against Brentford, but its also possible that Sinisterra could get the nod as he has been known to be able to play up top too. I think we do have options this season, but poor old Dan didnt really fit. Anyway all the stories will now be about Cody Gakpo who is coming in January. Well hold your horses because if he carries on scoring goals his price will rise even further and CL clubs will want him…. A final word on Dan James who didn't want to go but was put in a position where he knew he wasn't wanted. My view is that he was surplus to requirement because we dont use wingers as wingers. So his time at Leeds was really killed off back in February when Bielsa left the club. I feel sorry for James because he's played out of position ever since he arrived because of injuries etc. he never ever moaned and always ran his heart out, so I wish him well.
Leeds United, private jets and 24 hours that pushed them to the limit please log in to view this image By Phil Hay Sep 2, 2022 The drama played out through the medium of private jets: one flew with all but one seat empty, another didn’t leave the runway and a third had taken staff from Elland Road to Zurich some weeks earlier, creating an option just when time seemed to be running out. Leeds United’s attention swerved from Eindhoven to France, with some saved for London and enough left to turn to Switzerland before the transfer deadline late on September 1. The final 24 hours of their window set the gold standard for fraught, with deals slipping from the jaws of completion and no new striker in sight, until somewhere close to midnight in the UK, the club unveiled Wilfried Gnonto with very little warning. Gnonto was Leeds’ last-minute fall-back, the player they gravitated towards after other targets hit the wall or went absent without leave. The club had looked at the 18-year-old earlier in the summer and, in the background, negotiated a deal to bring him to England from FC Zurich in January. Zurich, in turn, allowed medics from Leeds to travel to Switzerland to complete tests. On Thursday evening, after one false start and no sign of alternative options materialising, the deal was brought forward and Gnonto signed on a five-year contract. The Italy international’s move was announced 45 minutes after the 11pm BST (6pm EDT, 3pm PDT) deadline and the legwork done in Switzerland to provide assurances about his fitness was the reason Leeds were able to move for him at such short notice, despite Gnonto not actually being in England. Everything else had drawn a blank but Gnonto was a transfer they could do, with willing cooperation from the club who were selling him. The people with responsibility for transfers at Elland Road — those who negotiate them, those who finance them and those who make the paperwork watertight — had been told to expect mayhem on deadline day or, if not that, a very busy time of it. From the moment Victor Orta took a plane to the Netherlands on Wednesday in hopeful pursuit of PSV Eindhoven’s Cody Gakpo, it was obvious the tail end of the window would call for quick feet and competent administration if Orta got his way with any of the players he was chasing. All being well, the club would have an incoming deal to finalise. All was not well on Thursday morning as Orta landed back in Leeds, minus Gakpo or any of the other people who were booked to travel with the winger. PSV rejected offers from Elland Road and Southampton and made it clear there was no room for more negotiation and no chance of a change of heart. The failure of that flight sent Orta home to Leeds Bradford Airport alone and down the path towards Bamba Dieng, headlong into the most fraught deadline day the club have experienced since Huw Jenkins turned off his phone in 2019. Once again, and as he had been then, Dan James was in the thick of it. Dieng came into play on Thursday morning, Plan B behind Gakpo, although discussions about Gakpo were themselves preceded by an offer to Wolves for Hwang Hee-chan. As Leeds waited for Dieng, Marseille’s Senegal international, to arrive from France on a one o’clock flight paid for by the club, James was on his way to Fulham to undergo a medical and sign on a season-long loan with a permanent option. It was not James’ intention to leave Elland Road in this window but Leeds and Marseille were in agreement over a £10million ($11.5m) fee for Dieng and James had been given the clearest of hints that Leeds would rather he moved on if another attacker was found. The club allowed him to miss training, making sure he was within easy travelling distance of various suitors. At almost the precise moment, around 5pm, when it transpired that Dieng had not flown to England and was instead at a private air terminal considering a rival offer from Nice, Fulham were taking signing photos of James, threatening the worst case of deja vu in footballing history. Three-and-a-half years ago, he went through the same formalities at Leeds, so close to signing from Swansea City with the deadline upon him that he had chosen a squad number and covered every conceivable base, just for Manchester United to swoop in at the last minute. But this time there was no going back. Having made it so clear that James was expendable, no amount of diplomacy was going to make an urgent recall palatable. How to tell a dispatched footballer that a peg was still free for him? How to pretend that he was wanted? please log in to view this image James has joined Fulham (Photo: Robbie Jay Barratt/AMA/Getty Images) Dieng, before long, disregarded the flight from France completely, plumping for Nice’s offer and leaving Leeds standing in the wreck of a day where everything threatened to go wrong. The first two months of their window were measured and proactive, but the last week of it dragged them into the madness which, at various intervals, visits Elland Road at this time of year. At points on Thursday, Leeds were in danger of exiting the market a man down, an inexcusable outcome especially because the recipient of James was another Premier League side. James was yesterday’s man and Dieng became the answer. And then, like that, Dieng was gone — off to Nice where, in Keystone Kops fashion, he failed a medical. Andrea Radrizzani, Leeds’ chairman, had taken the risk of tweeting about “welcoming Bamba Dieng” a short while before the transfer veered off the road, blowing the tweet up in his face. The club’s promise about their recruitment department’s skill in pulling rabbits out of the hat in the nick of time was a hostage to fortune, forgetting that deadline day is when needy buyers are most likely to be stitched up. Rodrigo’s dislocated shoulder meant a three-to-four week absence and it felt that, five games into the season, Leeds were in need of a result at Brentford on Saturday, if for no other reason than to divert attention to a happier place. The best part of the club’s window was what was wanted: players who had to go departing without dragging their heels, replacements targeted with strategic urgency and, as a rule, fitting the bill of both Jesse Marsch’s tactical model and Leeds’ resale model. But latterly, the strategy strayed into misjudgments and dead-ends: votes of confidence in their forward line, only for Rodrigo and Patrick Bamford to pick up injuries; inaction from the middle of July onwards, only to find that the last couple of days of the window called for planes flying in all directions; a missive to Gakpo and PSV which came to nothing, and a call to Dieng which fell foul of him giving Leeds the right signals and then backing out on them. Leeds try to factor character into the analysis of players and there was Dieng’s, laid bare. Or perhaps he merely felt that with approaches arriving for him so late, he owed very little to anyone. James, truly, has been through the wringer at Leeds. One move to Elland Road didn’t happen. The other that did went through incredibly late last summer and the coach who wanted him so badly, Marcelo Bielsa, was sacked less than six months later. He scrambled from the birth of his first child to helicopter down to a Carabao Cup tie against Fulham last season and spent the past fortnight getting the sense that his attempt to demonstrate a commitment to fighting for a place was not stopping Leeds listening to offers for him anyway. Who knows if he will be missed? Who knows how much Marsch would have played him because the club’s head coach declined to answer questions about him on Thursday. But however it is, Leeds need to turn a good start into a good season from here. Deadline day will be revisited if the staying power is not there. Leeds are understood to have asked Blackburn Rovers about Ben Brereton-Diaz late on, but none of the clubs on Brereton-Diaz’s trail liked Rovers’ valuation of him. Swansea City’s Joel Piroe was linked but Swansea had already decided that he would not be sold, while Leicester City’s Kelechi Iheanacho was of interest but unattainable. So, with the deadline closing in, Leeds reconvened and decided to speed up the arrival of Gnonto, increasing the fee slightly to around £5million to keep Zurich happy. Gnonto is pacey and a comfortable runner with the ball at his feet, a full international at the age of 18 and a bright prospect. He is also a player Marsch said was not Premier League ready a few short weeks ago. He might have to be now, or at least show the nous to learn on the job if Marsch needs him to. Deadline day has shown in the past that it has the capacity to deliver a Raphinha. It can also deliver a straight right to the chin and the peculiarity of Leeds’ summer was that five major deals done so efficiently gave them the chance to observe the bar-room brawl in the final 24 hours rather than participate in it. The joke in these parts is that the end of the window is always when chaos descends and lo it came to pass, with planes in different parts of Europe and phones ringing but nothing taking off — that is until Gnonto got the call. “It’s all good,” Radrizzani said in a final tweet, calling it “the madness of deadline day”. Maybe it was. But you did not have to walk far in Leeds to find people who thought a finish like this might be coming.
agree with most of that Doc... my only caveat to defend the club is its highly possible PSV and Gakpo were both dithering until the end of the window. Rumours gakpo was watching the scummers situation with Anthony. Sometimes you have no choice but to go elsewhere or wait. My convern as expressed on the other thread was that we seemed entirely unsure what profile of striker we wanted with various messages coming out of Elland Road. That's a bit disconcerting. I think they meant young prospect with sell on v proven but no upside. Surely they have a checklist and have prioritised/ranked their prospects.
Madness created by stupidity and "lessons not learnt" a decent transfer business overall apart from the glaringly obvious one's of a striker and left back which most fans seemed to think was pretty obvious we needed......onwards and fingers crossed upwards
Agreed mate especially on the messaging. We had loads of: “it needs to be the right fit, the right profile, we want someone to come in and not rock the boat” the reality is that the profile for Marsch and indeed for Bielsa is a hard working mobile player, who can play in various positions. bielsa/Rodrigo, Bielsa/Raphinha, Marsch/Rodrigo, Marsch/Sinisterra, Marsch/Aaronson. So CDK and Gakpo were the very best around in a price range we could reach. Gakpo spends most of his time as aNo9 but known as a winger. cDK is the same and both can even play as a 10.
yep spot on there doc... we all know what their profile is, how come they need a committee to work it out
Forget the crap about private jets. Life as to go on, forget Greta, or do you want to be cold, miserable and eating the bugs.
It was a pisstake, nobody detests the green blob more than me. Why we are fooked because the last 30 years politicians closed our sources of energy and sub contracted it out to make them feel good
As much as you try not to, you can't help comparing young players to players you've seen in the past. I know nothing of Willie Gnonto. I have had to resort to player profiles and YouTube. Lots of people saying he reminds them of Yeboah or Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink. After about 2 minutes it suddenly came to me where I had seen this guy before..... He's the new Ruel Fox! I'm telling you...its uncanny!
Thanks Doc you've summed up what I felt for the last few months about the age of certain members of the squad. They're getting on and they need replacing and in a couple of years were in the same boat with Paddy. Hopefully we're looking for replacement cos we don't want an aging squad that's going backwards.
The kid is so young he still has braces on his teeth, but a nice young fella. His parents came with him so no bird yet maybe Olof can sort him out at Winstons
Bugger.....the first two I would have snapped your hands off, proper strikers who had an inkling of where the onion bag was
