I understand that point just don’t believe we’ll be nowhere near the mark as the report suggested I’m waiting for a fab update anyway or Keith, feel like if we’d have had a bid rejected they’d say something personally
The club didn't believe the current stable of CBs was good enough for the Championship, hence why Mepham was signed. RLB said on Saturday that he wants defenders signed. Signing at least one CB reduces risk. If we go with our current CBs, we need 50% of them, at minimum, to make the jump. That's a huge risk, if we bring in one of the level of Lucumi or Diakite then the percentage goes right down and we'd only really need one of our current group to adapt quickly. The jump to the PL is huge. I personally have huge question marks over Ballard, yes he was brilliant in the playoffs but he was pretty poor outside of that, which is why he couldn't break into the team for a lot of the season. O'Nien is O'Nien, I know better than to right him off but even then he's currently injured. Alese has all the tools but can we rely on him? He's only played 2573 league minutes since joining. Seelt is coming off a big injury. We need one CB at minimum purely for a numbers reason, we more than likely need 2 just to reduce risk.
If we’re serious about Xhaka I’d imagine we’ll have to offer close to £100k a week. Worth it. If we go down he’ll not be sticking around so feels almost like a win win situation to me.
Now I'm gonna be annoying and say I think Xhaka will end up going to Saudi. But its nice Keith isn't shutting it down.
Sure that's just journo speak though, everyone says that when the first bids come in to calm down their fans. I think we very well could have had a first approach rejected though - definitely in the realms of possibility for me
get the feeling xhaka isn’t a footballer who will chase the money to saudi, he left arsenal for a pay cut to play, i think this may happen
He jumps the gun way too early sometimes, my mates who are fans of bigger clubs always just ignore him, but he obviously has sources and gets stuff right sometimes!