Losing Snodgrass on the first day was disastrous. He is the kind of player our midfield has sorely missed. Same with Diame. Replace Quinn and Meyler - both hard workers but very limited - with the aforementioned and we would have been much stronger this season. We would also have been much improved had our goalkeeper not lost his confidence halfway through the campaign and cost us vital points. Another big loss has been the Curtis Davies of last season. The FA Cup Final defeat seems to have broken him. Hernandez hasn't worked out (and in my opinion never will) but, though £10M seems a lot it's nothing for a proven striker. It was always going to be a gamble. Unfortunately it never paid off. My main beef is that we haven't bought a decent RB. Elmo is probably our fittest player, but even he can't be expected to run up and down the line all season and not get tired, as he has seemed over the past month. Not that he was ever much cop at defending. It's been a rubbish season and odds are we are going down, but we were always going to end the season in the bottom third. Look at the table as the final game approaches, it looks much the same as it does every year at this time. Leicester have over-achieved and Newcastle (please god, send them down) have imploded once again, but it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect.
Premier League Football. Obviously at the start of the season there were no guarantees Watford would get promoted this season. You know him personally to be able to suggest he wouldn't move North for PL football or a PL wage. It's all academic anyway - We pissed away £10m on a ****ing donkey.
Newcastle now appear to be our biggest hope of survival and they had not won a game under Carver until they came to the KC, outplayed us and won 3-0. I don't think they have won many more games since then. We totally rolled over with no commitment from any of the players that day and let them beat us. Also I was at St James Park when we were 2-0 up in the Second half when the Fat Geordie substituted Jelavic if I remember rightly who was holding the ball up superbly and replaced him with an extra defender to protect our lead. We had nobody upfront as an outlet. Result they scored 2 goals to equalise they gained a point and we lost 2 points. If we had won we would now be above them in the League instead of 2 points behind. They have taken 4 points from us in the 2 games and we have taken 1.
We had a £12m bid for Jordan Rhodes turned down remember. Hernandez was a gamble, he wasn't Bruce's no.1 target to replace Long he probably wasn't even no.2 (and his fee was £9.5m not £10m as the media likes to write).
And he should have signed Mystic Meg. That way, he could have avoided signing the players who turned out to be crocks, cokeheads, and the type of foreigners who need a season to get used to the premier league even though we're getting rid of such players at the end of that first season. He could have also get Meg to pick the team, who would know exactly which games 3 central defenders at the back was a crap idea, and which games it would turn out to be a masterstroke.
