Fair play to Mike?

Superb debate around this topic, nice to see well reasoned arguments, with each individuals opinion being respected and challenged constructively, without it getting personal or abusive.

 

You make some fair points like and I agree with a fair few. The Debuchy thing, I'm not so sure...Is there a reason we cannot pay a player's worth? Do we always have to pay a fraction of their true value? As far as I understand it, Lille gave his price and we never met it (coming in at least £1m under his asking price). If Lille had asked for £10m for Cabaye, or Twente asked for £7m for Tiote we probably wouldn't have gone for them, but they would've been worth it...I know you can't really do this with all transfers as some work, some don't, but I do think sometimes our desperation as a club to pick up bargains means we lose out on players who'd still be worth the money if we just paid it. I'm not suggest we OVERpay, but we shouldn't have to UNDERpay every time. Having said that, we played the waiting game on Cisse and got him for £6m less, I shouldn't be surprised if its the case again in January with a defensive target!

With the highlighted sentence, I think thats true enough, but if we're going to keep hold of our top players, we're going to need to probably get european football again, therefore we need to look at our squad relative the the rest of the league vying for Europe - I think we could've certainly made things more comfortable for ourselves in terms of bodies and even quality to an extent!

 

Let's also remember that the selling club is now forewarned and therefore forearmed when it comes to dealing with Ashley. His reputation for wanting a bargain and playing the poker face is now well known.
Surely this means that other Chairmen will approach him in a defensive manner from the get-go.
Do you think the success he has had playing hardball in the past, will mean every transfer becomes a battle ?
Thoughts ........

 

To an extent, yes. We know already that football dealings can turn personal on occasion. We know Liverpool didn't particularly want to do business with Newcastle over Carroll, that Dave Whelan ****ing hates Ashley and that the likes of Twente and Lille are now putting bigger and bigger tags on their players since they have seen the success Tiote and Cabaye have had, and how much their stock has risen since joining us.

I would say it would be the same for all managers/chairmen, but Swansea and Everton seem to have pulled off some amazing deals this summer!

 

Liverpool aside, I don't think MA's approach has been offensively aggressive. He tells you what he wants to pay. He offers you cah on the nail. He will tell you waht's his final offer. He will watch a deal go south rather than contradict himself. That's tough bargaining but it's not insulting

 

The problem is that in January players are usually more expensive, and we know how tight our board is. If Senegal do qualify then everyone is going to know we're desperate for strikers, and that means they'll hold out for a bigger fee. I'm just not sure whether our board will be prepared to pay it.

 

Rather my thought.

I beleive the club has a plan to bring in strikers if necessary, but they also had a plan to bring in Debuchy and Douglas. We know that plans will not be pursued if they prove to be more expensive than the club feels to be worthwhile.

We also know that MA will gamble on things just working out. He did send us into the last half of our promotion season with a sever shortage of strikers. He will, I'm sure, be willing to gamlbe on Pardew making do for the ACON if the alternative costs more than he thinks it is worth.

So far his luck has held. One can legitimately worry, however, that his streak may come to an end.

 

I'd agree with that. Comfortable is not a word in Mike's vocabulary though! He is clearly a lover of the business approach known as "creative tension"!!! I think he likes the idea of a siege mentality, i.e. the closer knit they are and the less he bends to everyones demands, the harder we work as an overall unit to overcome the challenges he likes us to face. There will be those who see this as dicing with death, but I must admit from my experience its a good system to work from.

 

This is true but I suspect if there is an incoming following the results of the qualifiers, the deal will be a foreign one, sorted well before the window opens and silly season starts. I suspect we'd target players soon to be out of contract and try to tie up a cut price deal. I do think it needs said too that it is highly likely they'll both be staying at home. Given this is the most likely scenario I can see the logic in holding off because you could end up with 3 very good strikers, finding it difficult to satisfy all. Yes we have the Europa games but the reality is they'd all want to play the big games.