After being told there is very little money to spend in the Summer (a dissapointing if not unsurprising revelation), we do need find ourselves a couple of bright sparks who can fire us to promotion. Liam Hearn I've been saying all season is a real player, heshould be given a trial with a view to signing over the summer, he looks like the real deal and if we loaned them Townsend and Emerton/Clarkson to fill the gaps then we might get him. If we are going to lose either Hobbs or Chester then make a contract offer for Ant Gerrard. Another season long loan with a view to a permanant for Mannone. A cheeky loan bid for Ryan Shotton at Stoke? On the fringes and has a killer long throw (which apparently Dudgeon has but I've not seen it as of yet...)
We will have money if we can offload Koren for £2m+ and Chester for a similar fee. We've moved on from last season and if we take a small step back with getting some decent cash from two of our better players we could look to use this on wages for one or two new additions.
What football have you been watching. We have already seen how we play minus those two and you want to sell them.
Does anyone really think that as a business man Mr Allam would even put into the media what our possible transfer budget will be in the summer. we don't know what went on in the last transfer window in terms of finance/barmby not being able to get the player/s he wanted, so to dream up unfounded rumours or use it as a case for slagging off people at the club (seems to be a lot of having a go at the owner tonight), is not helpful. Put it this way would we as a majority want Allam/Pearson running the club or Bartlett/Duffen "Running" the club
You don't have to spend a great deal of money to strengthen the squad there are tons of free transfers and loanies available, but its clear we need to strengthen.
Depends which part you mean. Very few contracts run out in December/January so there don't tend to be many free transfers available, so even if the need to strengthen was obvious it's harder to do. It's why despite us only bringing in King on loan and me being one of the main people complaining about the lack of depth I'm only disappointed we didn't make more of an effort to sign one more player. Other things I think we could have gambled on not covering. btw, I think on my last count we needed to sign 10 players in the summer to give us a suitable level of depth to mount a promotion challenge: 2x GK - we don't have a senior keeper for next season yet. 1x RB/CB - McShane and Cooper are currently the main two covering those 3 places in the team. 1x LB - Dudgeon is the only one contracted. 1x DM - we need someone who can do the job that McKenna does, because expecting him to play every game is compromising his performances and our ability to let which ever midfielder is alongside him do some attacking. 1x AM - we need to sign cover for Koren, and when I say cover I mean someone to be on the bench who can come on for the last half hour so we can rest Koren without dropping him (we had Barmby for this until he became manager) 2x LW - we don't currently have one for next season 1x RW - we currently only have McLean 1x CF - someone big who can play regularly either as a lone striker or as partner to the others. As I'm counting McLean as a winger there, we could probably also do with another RW/ST to replace Simpson when he goes which is the 10th contract to be signed. If any out of contract players (eg Dawson) have deals confirmed then that figure obviously reduces. There are obviously players like Ghilas and Olofinjana (Cairney and Evans ahead of him) that just don't fit into a sensible squad, so if they went they wouldn't need replacing on top of what's mentioned, where as McShane doesn't fit but if he left we'd need a CB and a RB rather than one or the other. Equally if a kid comes in and does well in the next few games they could be seen as the 4th winger or something like that which would reduce the signings we need to make. Or if Bradley impresses enough he could become the 4th CB in place of Cooper, with Cooper becoming the alternate left back to Dawson (if he signs a contract) and Dudgeon becoming one of the left wingers.
