Yes - that is correct. But surely it can't be a bad thing if we have a clear view on when the seller is taking the piss. No-one else bought Berahino so I don't think there is any evidence that we made a mistake. Also conceptually I don't believe there is any such thing as a 'striker'. Some players will score a lot of goals if played in that position and some won't but there seems very little evidence that previous performance is any guide to the future. I'd much rather we bought players who we think represent good value than have the right number of mediocre 'strikers'.
Sounds like you could write a guide book for travel in Africa !!!! My favourite place in Africa was Walvis Bay, only there for a short time though. You wouldnt get me in a mine deedub !! I work on ships that work within the oil and gas industry. Some I've been on lay their pipelines some have divers on, some have survey gear on, out here the job is mainly inspecting pipelines, subsea wells and platform jackets(legs). Its my job to keep the ship in correct position..no pressure then !!! I've had some good travels too, pretty much anywhere you'd find an oil or gas platform I've worked. N America, Central America, all Europe, West Africa, middle east, far east it goes on. Never made it to Sth America though which is a pity. Could write a book meself although would have to use an alias as Im pretty sure I'd be divorced, locked up, in rehab or all of the above. I've enjoyed it although all the travelling's gettin a bit old now, anyway be back home in Ireland on Sat evening all being well.
I'm sorry but striker is a specialist position. To some it is more natural than others but the chances of, say, a right back or defensive midfielder being able to play up-front successfully over a season for a top 4 club are very, very slim. I don't see anyone at the club presently who can replace Kane to an acceptable level in the PL. What someone is worth is relevant to the quality of player, need of the 2 clubs for the player and the money available. Why did Liverpool pay £35m for Andy Carroll? Because Newcastle didn't need to sell and Liverpool had just sold Torres to Chelsea for £50m. They needed a striker badly and the seller exploited it. We did the same to Real Madrid with Bale and to Manchester United with Berbatov. It may be that Berahino was more expensive than we had funds to purchase. Okay, but we should have had a back-up plan and left ourselves time to implement it. This was obviously a key issue over the summer as we knew full well we were getting rid of Soldado and Adebayor. Between Levy, Pochettino and Paul Mitchell they fumbled it. I don't see other clubs having no options in a key position. If we had only 1 goalkeeper would we accept that or go and buy the best option we could afford? United only had Rooney after selling Hernandez and Van Persie and so when they set their sights on Martial they had to accept that it was going to cost them top dollar. Did it cost them more than they hoped? Sure it did. West Ham bought Jelavic for £3m to come off the bench. He isn't going to score 30 in a season but he set up their goal against us when he came on. We need to buy the best striker we can afford not wring our hands and do nothing complaining about the market. If we needed more money for a player like Berahino then buying Clinton N'Jie was a wrong move.
N'Jie was not some sort of backup plan for Berahino - N'Jie was signed with a couple of weeks of the transfer window to go, long before Jeremy Peace started playing silly buggers...silly buggers who think people didn't notice Kvetch Brom signing three strikers in the summer window, yet he tried the "we don't have time to sign a replacement" line. If anything, N'Jie was most likely signed as a right winger: Lennon was always going to be sold in the summer, while Lamela would've been loaned to Marseilles if not for OM filling their quota of loanees which torpedoed any potential move
I'm not suggesting that N'Jie was signed as a striker but that he cost us £10m or thereabouts that could have been spent on a striker. Instead of offering WBA something like £5m up front which was daft we could have gone with £15m plus add-ons and bargained from there. N'Jie's been fairly peripheral to the team and given that we kept Townsend and Lamela the money could have been better used. I think Clinton's got talents but what he adds is less than a second striker would contribute.
If Clinton cost £10m and is going to be worth £20m and Berahino costs £30m and would be worth £15m then it is obvious which is the better signing whatever the short-term implications. You perhaps ought to take what Pochettino, Levy and Mitchell chose to do as being more likely to be right for the club than what you and I think.
This is speculative. A player's worth is more than just what you paid and what you can sell him for! It's about improving the squad, adding something that's missing, scoring that vital goal(s) that can be the difference between winning a major trophy, or not. If all Levy is going to think of is the profit potential of a player, then we are truly ****ed!..
I'm afraid Levy is as fallible as anyone else. He appointed Ramos and AVB, backed Commolli over Jol, oversaw the frittering of most of the Bale money, agreed to pay Adebayor £100K a week and others. For every good decision there's a corresponding negative. We'll probably never know exactly what happened leading to such a monumental **** up but the management (either collectively or certain individuals) made a right bollocks of it. I am a big Pochettino fan but after a summer at the U21 Championships, Harry Kane now has to play just about every game for us. He'll play all the England games up to the Euros and spend the summer playing for England in France. It's too much and if we don't break him it'll be a miracle. That's just rank bad management and I can't see that we couldn't find someone to help with that.
We'll be headed to Australia next July to compete in the International Champions Cup against Juventus, Melbourne Victory and one club TBC: http://www.foxsports.com.au/footbal...ions-cup-in-2016/story-e6frf423-1227659577167
As long as we don't jet off to the States again as well as going Down Under I'm fine with it. Doubt we'll take the Euro contingent which will be a sizeable contingent of the squad.
Everyone makes mistakes. If you think about it logically most hard decisions have a 50:50 chance of being right (that's why they are hard). If you don't have a limit on how much you will pay for a player (taking into account market price and urgency) then you will always pay too much and the club will go bust. Levy has brought us from being an underperforming mid-table side to one that has finished at or above its 'rightful' place in terms of resources available for each of the last few years. No other club Chairman has come close to that in recent years.
I agree that people make mistakes. Lord knows we've seen plenty. However, flogging Harry Kane until he gets exhausted and/or injured is a really big mistake. What if he gets injured against Southampton? What will we do then? Buying a decent striker can be difficult, I grant you, but it isn't impossible. If we think that is the case what the hell are our scouts doing? There are 19 other clubs in the PL, how do they manage? Just because we can't buy Martial or Berahino or Messi for our budget doesn't mean we should give up and go home. If we can't afford Harrods we need to go shopping in Sainsbury's or Aldi but we need another striker unless we want to waste this season and hasten the departure of our better players (again).
Of the other 19 clubs, 15 routinely finish below us in the league and the other 4 have more money. Of those four there is only one who has a striker I would swap for Kane and the second striker at three of them would not improve our squad. I agree on not burning Kane out but I think all the 'strikers' we could sign for a reasonable price would be no better in practice than Son or Chadli in that position.
You just know I'm not going to agree. I see very little likelihood that Chadli or N'Jie would be effective 'up top' for more than nuisance value at the end of matches. If we picked either to start against Southampton or Norwich I wouldn't be optimistic. N'Jie's scoring record is no great shakes in France and he can't hold the ball up and Chadli despite having the physique to play the position doesn't have the heart to go up against centre halfs like West Brom's, Stoke's or Norwich's. We're the 6th richest club in England and the 13th richest in Europe and we can't afford a striker? No, that just doesn't cut it. All of the options don't play in the PL. There's a whole world of strikers out there for us to purchase. We thought we'd get Berahino out of West Brom on the cheap and it didn't happen because they stood up to our tactics like we did to Chelsea over Modric. Given the structure of our bid it's no surprise either. That would have been fine if we'd left ourselves time to sign someone else. We didn't and it was a bad mistake and the fact that Harry Kane has played all but one of our games so far this season and the games we have lost and drawn this season are games where Kane hasn't scored is proof of it.
Exactly! This is all about resale value. The less money spent, the more profit, the bigger the club's worth.
Here's a short list of strikers with six months remaining on their contracts, which would give us far more room to negotiate Alexandre Pato (Corinthians) Charlie Austin (QPR) Ezekiel Lavezzi (PSG) Aleksander Kokorin (Dinamo Moscow) Cheik Diabete (Bordeaux) Olexander Gladky (Shakhtar Donetsk) Andrija Zivkovic (Partizan Belgrade) ...and that's ignoring players who are either going to be outside our wage structure (Ibrahimovic), are probably too old to fit in with out team (Berbatov, David Villa, Klose, Pavlyuchenko, Palacio, Arshavin), would sound like I'm trolling (N'Gog, Chamakh, Steven Fletcher, Kenwyne Jones, Joel Campbell, Nick Powell)
If they only have six months remaining on their contract, there are two reasons for that. One, they have been offered a new one and have refused to sign it - which begs the question, why haven't they been put up for sale while they still had some residual value? Or, secondly, they haven't been offered a new contract, to which the question is, why??
A few of them I can either repeat what's been said elsewhere, or make an educated guess Pato - Corinthians hired a manager who didn't rate him and immediately loaned him to Sao Paulo for eighteen months, which wouldn't encourage anyone to re-sign Austin - was expecting to move in the summer that never happened, but there's no way he'd move in January if he signed a new contract with a Championship club Lavezzi - also expecting to move last summer that didn't happen, so again has no incentive at all to extend his contract Zivkovic - several clubs have been looking to sign him (Spurs, Arsenal, Atletico Madrid, Valencia and Villarreal all mentioned) so signing a new contract might cool their interest I've listed those four for a simple reason, namely they have all been linked with Spurs: Pato has been strongly linked with us since the summer, Austin and Lavezzi were during the summer (although in Lavezzi's case the signings of Son and N'Jie probably mean we won't be looking at him) while Zivkovic's name has been linked since the summer As for the rest of the list... Kokorin - Dinamo had to pay over the odds to sign him from Anzhi a couple of years back, so presumably this includes wage demands Gladky - the Donbass region has seen several incidents in the Russian/Ukrainian hostilities, so isn't somewhere that someone would voluntarily stay if they can get the hell out Diabite - no idea
I think I read that Austin had been offered to M.P, by Levy, but was rejected as not being suitable for our style of play. Which, I think, may be a problem in general. Our manager seems very set in the way he wants us to play and won't accept any player(s) that he feels don't, or won't fit his system.
