Following that logic we shouldn't be getting rid of Ndombele cos he's not played enough games for us. In order to strengthen our squad we need to move players on. And imo the 11 I mentioned (including the 3 you mention) are the ones to go.
If we qualify for European football next season, then we'll need significant squad depth. I'd be very happy to see us bring in a starting striker and keep Richarlison and Werner, too. Son should be our first choice on the left, where his weaknesses aren't exposed. That still leaves us with a ton of work to do in the market and plenty of players to move on. We need to make the loan system do more for us, too.
Ndombele needs to go because he also isn't getting minutes at the clubs we've loaned him to At this point the Loan Watch thread is mainly waiting for the moment Djed Spence overtakes the amounts of minutes he's played, which may well happen by the end of April
My mistake, I thought that comment was made by PowerSpurs not yourself. I still think Skipp and Tanganga have had ample time and managers to show they’re good enough. All the managers can’t be wrong.
Emerson is ok for a game here and there but if Porro gets a long injury then Emerson isn’t good enough to replace him.
I think it's especially damaging, because Porro's been so good in a very strange role. Emerson can do a job there, but he's not on the same level. The obvious problem is that nobody else who's prepared to be backup would be, either. I'm not sure what the solution could be, but I suspect that Emerson's attitude may win out. He seems to be relentlessly positive and happy to do whatever's asked of him. The other possibility may be keeping him and signing Kyle Walker-Peters as competition. There may be a choice there between the Brazilian and Ben Davies as a squad player.
I think KWP would be interesting. Obvious benefit of HG/CG status particularly for Europe. Any shootout between Davies and Emerson only has one winner IMO. Ange might like Emerson’s attitude but he loves Ben Davies and I think the Welshman is the better squad option too.
Davies should only be a back up centre back now. Emerson isn’t good enough at centre back to be an option imo. KWP nowhere near as good as Porro but would tick a box for the club trained situation. All depends on the price I guess.
I should clarify my earlier comment. About two thirds of our signings won't be worth what we pay for them....that seems to be the case across the whole league. There is barely any difference in quality between the 200th best player in the world and the 500th. What difference there is is dwarfed by the variability in performance from game to game. So I reckon you need at least 100 games of data to tell whether you have the 200th best or the 500th best. No coach has anyway of telling either but has a much greater insight into attitude and flexibility than any of us. But if his judgement is that eg Bissouma is very slightly better than Skipp he should play Bissouma every match shouldn't he? What we need to do is buy better players and sell the ones who we get the most premium for. But we are not getting 11 new players in the next window so we can't sell 11 either. Since we can't tell whether Hojbjerg is better than Skipp we should sell Hojbjerg because he will command a bigger fee.
Yeah I think Davies is a significantly better player. I’ll never knock Emerson’s commitment and work rate but his ability really is at the lower end of the table and I’m trying to be as nice as possible with that. Though going forward I don’t see a future for either under Ange. Emerson for ability related reasons and whilst I’ve been a big Davies admirer for years, this might actually be where it finally is time to part ways, for his sake more than anything. He’ll be 31 this month and his game time is only going to decline. He’s only played twice in the last seven matches and one of those was a ten minute cameo, Dragusin’s arrival means emergency CB game time has decreased and if we seek a new LB in the summer which I think is likely, then it’s hard to see where he gets minutes barring an injury crisis as he isn’t ousting Udogie and presumably the potential new LB will be more geared towards an Ange style of FB, it could even result in Ben being out of the match squad in total if he stayed and I wouldn’t want that for him, similar as I didn’t want Hugo to be a backup, I have too much respect for them.
The only thing is that Ben is already well down the road to establishing his post-playing career and it may actually suit him to have a final season to put the final plans in place while not having the pressure of playing other than a few minutes here and there. Especially as we will likely have a significant increase in matches to cover.
Add to that we don't know what he does behind the scenes Case in point Danny Rose was helping out with the academy for a while in spite not playing (for myriad reasons), so with Ben already a licensed coach it wouldn't surprise me if there's plans to have him get his feet wet with our youth teams for the next year
I’d have no qualms if he wanted to stay whatsoever and I think he has the capacity to actually become a decent coach/ manager in time but I just think he’s probably got about 2-3 more decent seasons left in him at Prem level, would using one of those to play possibly just about 5 times (if we did bag another LB) be any good for him?
As HBIC mentions, he may already have a part time off-field role and as he is clearly a very dedicated professional, I would imagine he would keep himself in good condition and would only take that option (of giving up a full time PL playing career) if he's ready to do it.
Actually most of our signings do get five year contracts. Very few players will be bad enough to justify selling within two years....Mourinho picked Ndombele a lot for example. Whatever the solution to improving our performance it definitely isn't removing statistical limits by magic.
