Thanks this is helpful! Given we are stuck with what we have! Anyone see mileage in converting a player to CB cover?
I also like your charts JK. My feeling would be that players should only have one 'green' position. Thus Brady would be a yellow at LB as it's a secondary position, much like Wisdom at CB, say. Just a thought.
I said (half jokingly) on twitter today that if Chris Sutton and Dion Dublin could double up as CBs or strikers, why not Lafferty? He's got the height and seems largely surplus to requirements up front...and Ruddy could do with some penalty saving experience!
Hmm... maybe. I'll make some adjustments and see how it looks. EDIT: taking your suggestion on board, it looks like this:
Might it be worth including any young players who might be called upon in an emergency. Perhaps they could have the third colour in our second change strip!
I thought about including Loza, McGrandles, and Hall-Johnson. To be honest though, I don't think they'll get very near the first team at all unless there's some serious problems!
Well, here you go! http://xtheline.co.uk/shocking-new-6m-derby-signing-says-wrong-club-name-whilst-on-tv/?
Crystal Palace's chairman has come out and said the deal that took Glenn Murray to Bournemouth meant they couldn't let Gayle go too, they couldn't risk being too short on strikers. I can't help but feel that if we'd let Grabban go to Bournemouth for £5-6m rather than holding out for the deadline day offer of £7m we accepted, Bournemouth would have been less keen on Murray and we could have signed Gayle for £8m. For the £2m difference, Gayle would have been an upgrade on an unhappy Grabban (or arguably a happy one...) even if he wasn't quite the calibre of striker we'd have liked. Ah well.
According to Bournemouth, we only turned it down at the last minute because we couldn't replace him. It's kind of odd really. Bournemouth signed Murray, which meant Palace couldn't sell us Gayle, which meant we couldn't replace Grabban if he went, so stopped his move to Bournemouth. Hence my comment above. I'm not sure either Dave that it's only obvious with hindsight. We knew the price for Gayle for several weeks after Bristol City had a bid accepted, and it was last Tuesday that Grabban stormed off, so the initial bid from Bournemouth must have been slightly earlier. The bid for Grabban was supposedly around £5m, but we held off until the last minute to bid for Gayle. I don't think it would have been unreasonable to have signed Gayle a few days before the deadline, then if we really felt we had to, try and eke out a bit more from Bournemouth. Even if Grabban hadn't gone, I think the finances would have supported it - the bids for defenders don't seem to have required strikers to leave. It feels like we've tried to hold out for an extra £1m from Bournemouth, and in doing so we've ended up stuck with an unhappy striker. Obviously it's down to McNally and Neil to decide whether a happy Gayle would have been worth the extra £1m.
Which doesn't take Albert Einstein to figure out! Shame there's no 'system restore' button, so we could rewind and start the last 24 hours all over again - I betcha the outcome would be slightly different if we could!
I don't think that's the rumour - the rumour was that we'd accepted £7m for Grabban. It's just that when Palace pulled out of our deal for Gayle, we then felt we had to pull out of the sale for Grabban otherwise we wouldn't have enough strikers (which seems weird as I count five...)
All of this only happened yesterday when Bournemouth - who have now revealed that Gradel is out for 6 months - suddenly signed Murray and we were still trying to sign Walters and/or Naismith. Had we got either of them we would not have been interested in Gayle and could have sold Grabban to Bournemouth. As it was we were rebuffed by Stoke and Everton and by then Gayle was unavailable because Murray had been sold. With Lafferty likely to go out on loan and Hooper possibly going to Sheff Wed - deals do get suddenly revived on deadline day - we couldn't afford to let Grabban go. Vicious circles all round summing up the madness of transfer deadline day. I do not think AN or DM can be blamed for any of it. If Gayle was their first choice I agree they could have got him earlier but clearly AN wanted Walters or Naismith and as such had little interest in Gayle until yesterday afternoon. That is how I see it anyway.
Hang on a mo - I don't think it's that clear cut. If Bournemouth had agreed a price for Grab'n'run, why did they sign Murray?
