"Just sign whatever is available" got us Carrillo. We basically had a day after Gakpo turned us down. I really don't think a last-day panic striker would have significantly improved our chances.
Edozie actually looks quality but anyway... money wasn't the reason we didn't get a striker. We offered £30m+ for Gakpo on deadline day, so the money is clearly there for the right player.
Obviously I’m not suggesting we panic buy. But I don’t watch enough football to know who is good or not. There are people employed by the club to do that job. We had what 3 or 4 months for our scouts to find a decent enough striker.
You could say that for Leeds, Brighton, us, Everton etc. Which would suggest that there might not have been a particularly obvious one out there... EDIT - the ones that did panic were Wolves, who bought a man made of glass for lots of cash, then Diego Costa who is 83 and just got sent off.
Therein lies the problem. If you expect to sign your players on deadline day, you’re going to likely be frustrated.
We did most of our business early. With Gakpo, it was a fairly extended saga, and only came down to the final two days because that's when he made his decision. It's unfortunate, but so it goes. We also tried to sign other creative players (Luis Sinisterra for one) but they chose other teams, as well.
Yeah, the issue for me there is "deadline day" rather than any issue regarding money. It was criminal for us to putting all our eggs in one basket, right at the very end. By all means spend June and July tracking your lead target. But at some point, you kind of have to accept defeat and move on. I'm pleased that we didn't go with "Gakpo or anyone" and duly sign some useless, waste of space panic buy. But I'm not pleased that we did essentially go with "Gakpo or no-one".
Most of the signings we made are good. Individually I’m happy with them all, more or less. But none of them have made a significant improvement to the team, bar ABK. Lavia is great, but he’s no better than Romeu (at the moment), who we let walk off without even offering a contract. It just seems we tried to sign too many ‘for the future’, and not enough for the now.
I genuinely don't know what to make of that match. First half we were utter garbage but second half we dominated and missed 3 or 4 gilt edged chances. So damn frustrating we came away empty handed.
Well, there were comments on here that the players aren’t good enough, so it couldnt be Ralphs fault. So then, which players were on in the 2nd half? Seemed to be pretty much the same ones, so how does that work?
I'm fine with the focus on the future. They simply had a massive task to rebuild the squad, because there was very little quality anywhere. We also let Romeu go because he wanted to go home. He probably took a pay cut of two-thirds or more to do so.
So what? Im talking about the way we played, 2nd half well, first half dreadful. Scoring would be nice, but it is illogical how we are night and day from one half to the other. The very fact this **** keeps getting discussed after almost every game is a pretty good outlier that **** isnt right, not so much with the players, but the bloke in charge,
Disagree about the ‘little quality’ comment. We’ve had a decent enough squad for a while now; we just lack one or two actual game changers. Strikers who can shoot, playmakers who can create. Re: Romeu; maybe you’re right. I just feel if we wanted to keep him badly enough, we could have tempted him. Didn’t even put an offer on the table.
Hey, how about trying Mara out for, you know, more than 5 mins a game. Im pretty sure he could shoot better than Che.
