Great bit of business by us letting him run his contract down... Also how ironic will it be the last game of the season when..... Beckford scores and Kasper saves a pen and they go up as Champions..... **** ...thats going to hurt!
The great business management system by Bates and his team, you have to give them credit, they are at least consistant in their utterly poor management of this football club. I really can't wait till Bates dies and the club opens up to how he has run this club, it will shock many people.
Let's see ringo. I'll get the calculator out. Seeing as we got nowt for him, that's 20% of nowt= nowt. Poor old Ken. Nowt to come.
I feel another court case coming on, with Bates insisting that he agreed that Beckford could only move to a Premiership club and that if he moved back to The Championship with another club within two years, Bates..sorry Leeds would be entitled to 25% of the transfer fee.
so beckford snubs going back to leeds and signs for the foxes who in is eyes is a better run club with far better prospects than fulham or leeds combined....great move for becks that will surely secure a promotion spot for the foxes...
It'll be interesting to see the reception he gets when he plays against Leeds, & how he reacts should he score against us.
A move back to Leeds was never on offer and I would suggest even if it had been, Beckford would have refused due to his anger at the way Bates and the board treated him.
I'm going to go out and say it, we are bitter about this one. Beckford is a legend and he's going to rip the league a new one. Expect 20 goals at least. I'd bet on him being top scorer this season.
jt i know you got nowt for him, Everton got £4.5, so if a deal was done before he was a free agent with a 20% clause attached you would have something to come back now, thats why i asked.
So we could have given Beckford £20k a week on a new contract, over three years just a bit over £2 million (after 2nd year)... If those goals were not enough to get us promoted last season we could have sold him this season for 4 million and been 2 million in pocket. Instead we look at the short term and allow him to walk out, I thought Bates was a business man?
Any money we get for anything isn't a consolation for any of the **** we have to put up with - because we all know Grayson will never see a penny of it.
Yeah but I'd argue we'd have scored more if he'd stay. A forward line of Becchio and Beckford with Gradel and Snoddy on the wings would have got us promoted. Instead of seeing Barndoor Billy and McCormack last season, we'd have had a striker with pace that is guaranteed goals. He makes the runs and if he's supplied with the right pass he scores. I don't think Snodgrass has played as well since Beckford left because he doesn't have anyone making the runs off the defence to thread a pass through anymore.
No way mate, grayson always complained that while in league 1, he stated that we werent getting enough goals from the midfield and he claimed if we had, we would have won league 1 in march. Which to be fair i agree, despite my anger! Since hes gone weve had, becchio, gradel, somma, howson, nearly snodgrass on double figures! Plus goals from subs sam and watt!
That's not to do with Beckford really. Beckford scored 85 goals in 150 games for Leeds and had we paid the money to retain him, we'd have had a better strike force. How was having a 30 goal a season striker stopping our midfielders from scoring?
Because they expend their efforts on trying to pass/cross the ball to Beckford instead of looking to work as a unit and the goals thereby being more frequent and more spread out. Is it a coincidence that we also score more when Somma's not playing?
We scored 77 goals in 09/10 and only 4 more in 10/11. It's hardly like since he's left, we've added a lot more goals to our game. Snodgrass scored less goals and got less assists than in the two previous seasons with Beckford. Becchio scored only 4 more in the season without Beckford. The reason we scored more was probably down to Gradel's scoring and Howson playing in the advanced role. So for the sake of 4 goals, it's really not enough to make an arguement that we play better without Beckford. Also, I don't think Somma has started enough games for us to make that comparision between our goals when he plays and when he doesn't. If we'd been playing 4-4-2 last season and had retained Beckford, with Howson dropped back into a midfield position he wouldn't have reached double figures, but Beckford would have scored over double what he had. We'd have scored more goals.
It's not necessarily a huge edge that it gives us - and yes it's probably as much down to the 4-2-3-1 formation as it is to the personnel - but you've also got to remember that Beckford was a passenger for huge portions of a match and the rest of the team had to carry him. It was like playing with 10 men until he popped up and scored. I'd rather have 11 noticeable players battling the opposition and working for each other. It's useful to have a player like Beckford as a supersub, make no mistake, and I'd have been happy for us to keep him, but I don't think this particular instance is one for us to get upset about. His departure was what paved the way for our freer, more attacking football last season. We also have McCormack and eventually Somma who can both score as many as Beckford in this division. Somma started 12 games last season, so I think it is fair to look at the team goal haul when he was involved. When he played, below average. When he didn't, about average (1.8 goals).
