Be interesting if Acun is here Friday as he could make them deadline day signings for the publicity he does love sky sports. He could spread them out through the day for a lot of coverage.
On this subject, odd that Estupinan's transfer hasn't yet been confirmed, will this follow the confirmation of our replacement?
Puerta been speaking live to a Columbian YouTube channel. Says he can play as a 6 or 8, but prefers playing as an 8
With six signings supposedly still being worked on, none of them sounding imminent and less than 48 hours left, I think we probably ought to be prepared for the disappointment of one or two of them falling through. This happens every year and we always end up going into the autumn with slightly less firepower than we intended to because we run out of time to do things at the last minute. I really don't like that the window works this way but it seems to be the reality for a club in our position.
I think there are a lot of unrealistic expectations within the fanbase over the young players we've signed. Hughes broke into a poor Wigan side which finished bottom of the Championship, there was little pressure/expectation that they'd stay up. Like any young centre-half, he'll make mistakes and we'll have to be patient with him. Puerta is similar, he only played 228 minutes last season, was on loan in 2.Bundesliga the year before but didn't play either. The u20 tournament he excelled at for Columbia was 18 months ago so he's not played much football since he was in Colombia and it looks like he played in the 2nd tier over there. Same again with Zambrano, listening to the pod, he's only recently become a starter, so he's not played as much as it appears. He needs to bulk up physically and as we saw with his debut, there's a lot to like but also plenty to work on. A lot of people seem to be getting really excited by these 3 but it's extremely optimistic to think they'll walk in and play consistently well immediately considering they all lack senior game time (to differing degrees) and are replacing some very good players at this level.
"Wait til the end of the window to judge, don't complain that we haven't got people in in pre-season" .. "Well we ran out of time, what can you expect" Always the way.
You can't blame the window. If, and it's a big if, we end up short again, it's on the club. I've seen Liam Cullen being speculated about today (not for us, just that he's available). If he were available for a similar fee to Millar, that would be a very smart addition. He's only 25, can play right across the front 3 and his output is decent.
I just don't think there's a better explanation for us and other clubs finding ourselves in this position year after year than that it's the way the window works for clubs outside of the elite few, which is why I put it that way.
We're just badly run, and there's not another term for it. We repeatedly go into the last week of the summer window needing to do a significant amount of business. I'm sure Acun likes the PR but signing a free agent in the last week of the window is a lack of thought. You're just not giving the manager a chance.
