Just read an article in my scottish daily record (dont know how to do the link) . After Jordan Rhodes 2 goals for Scotland U21s Mark Wotte has said " he is a special talent , bluntly the best goal scorer in the uk " . Spilt milk or water under the bridge , call it what you like but its just ****ing annoying that keane just cast this talent aside .
then spent the next 2 years trying to get a goalscorer in, at one point I heard Keane wanted us to pay £4million to get Chopra in!!
So we are lead to believe that Roy was told to get rid of either Rhodes or Wickham and he chose Rhodes, do you guys then think it should have been the other way around because personally i feel he got it right and the 8 million+ for Wickham proves that!! If you want to moan then moan at the idiot that WRONGLY told him he had to choose between the two, maybe loan one out but to sell one was stupid. Yes Roy was ****e but you can't blame him for everything, especially the Rhodes thing and also he tried to bring in the likes of Derry but Clegg couldn't seal the deal, i think Clegg is more than culpable in all this!!
I know this is old ground and we will probably go around and around in circles about it as we have done for 3 years but One thing that I think Clegg has going for him, is that he doesn't tell a manager who to buy or sell or interfere on pitch matters for that reason I think Keane is completely to blame. Say even if Clegg said to Keane right you have to get rid of Wickham or Rhodes, do you really think Keane would have said yes okay then if he would have thought of Rhodes that highly? I don't think Clegg gets involved in those sort of decisions ultimately the manager has final say, maybe not on wages of players coming in or final transfer prices but not on players currently at the club and It can't have been that he was even on high wages so it can't have been for financial reasons either!! As for the argument whether it was either Wickham or Rhodes I just don't buy that, I could understand it a bit more perhaps say if it was a GK as there is only 1 position available but still we tried to develop Supple and Price at the same time(I know neither worked out). I actually think Wickham and Rhodes would have complimented each other. So at the moment say if we got an offer for say Cresswell for £1 million do we except because we have a decent prospect in Whight coming through or if someone comes in for Whight for 200k plus add ons we sell him because he is unlikely to get past Cresswell. Or Hyam and Lawrence, do we sell Hyam for pitance because we think Lawrence will be the better player in the end and we have to chose between the 2? I just don't buy it!! The real thing that annoys me though was he didn't even get the chance to prove himself despite his past acheivements suggesting he probably would. Even with the luxury of hindsight I think I would've prefered for us to have kept rhodes, whilst Wickham has great potential and we sold him for alot of money every team in the country is looking for a natural goalscorer and these are few and far between and we potentially had one on our doorstep a young one at that. Wickham's game is different and i doubt he will score as many goals as rhodes.
Yes and you would hardly think a youth player was on high wages. Also selling him to get in an initial 200k and then spending about £8 million on players in that same transfer window it's hardly a drop in the ocean. I personally wouldn't have bought Colin Healey in that transfer window(who was probably on higher wages) and kept rhodes, although that would have left us 50k out of pocket as he cost 150k!!
Anyhow its all pie in the sky as Rhodes has not yet done it in the Championship, let alone the Premiership, so actually all this ranting and raving is over potential and nothing else!! Obviously we will find out this coming season, if he does the job then everyone can moan but until then.......
Oh and one more thing, did any of you moan about Bobby Robson deciding against taking on Gazza and Ruud Gullit? No, i doubt it and they went on to be far bigger than Rhodes ever will be! Its in the past so lets move on and look forward to the new young talent that will be brought in, am pleased with Hewitt and am hoping for more of the same!!
No as I wasn't born then, I'm sure if I was I would've been rating about it still now The circumstances are slightly different however, he was our player and had proven himself at every level he had played whereas Gazz and Gullit were younger unheard ofs. I'd imagine there wasn't much fuss at the time because noone had heard of them, whereas there was a big fuss when Rhodes left as he was quite well known at ITFC and a big future was expected of him.
Its a bit different - those two were only on trial and maybe they were fact on the day. I saw Rhodes play in a preseason friendly at Charlton about two weeks before he was sold and he looked like a world beater at a time when we had no decent strikers.
On top of all this some prem clubs are even starting to look at Liam Trotter, another one who was smart enough to leave the club under Roy's tenure.
Did Roy not offer Trotter a new contract? To be fair many on here thought Trotter wasn't good enough unlike JR who we all wanted to see play more and even under Jim's command!!
Even if he was offered a contract he must of thought his chances of regular first team were better away from Ipswich. I'm not saying we all wanted him to stay but it's funny how so many people thought Garvan was the dog bollocks but it's Liam who is atttracting interest. What I'm trying to say is you don't really know how good a player is until you let them play every week and let them learn from mistakes.
San Diego The thing is, some players do really well at one club but ****e at another, one player will start off looking like a world beater while another looks ****e and yet as they mature the roles are reversed. Its all one great big gamble, unless you are super rich!! At the end of the day Jim made mega mistakes, as did Roy and as did Jewell we just have to hope that Jewell has learned from his mistakes and he finds a winning formula, if not i feel it will be curtains by xmas!! TBH i think he has started off well by signing Hewitt and i just hope he continues to bring in the right players, yes it may make ptc right (which is my worst fecking nightmare) but its worth all the suffering if we become a force again, even better if Villa do the double over the budgies with Bent scoring a double hat-trick!!
I never really rated Trotter tbh, I always thought he looked terrible on the ball, clumbsey and just lumbered around the pitch. I couldn't understand why Keane was playing him over the likes of Garvan. I genuinely cannot remember a time where I thought, this Trotter looks like he's going to be a decent player. I wasn't to fussed about it at the time and tbh I'm still not overly fussed about it now. It's just one of those things, we offered him a contract, he never really played well here and perhaps thought it was best to move on and was perhaps a good decision. As Spanish said certain players look brilliant, like Garvan & Bowditch but don't amount to much maybe due to various reasons, luck plays a part but mainly application (I think those 2 are/were very talented players) and then others like Trotter who quite frankly looked awful turn out to be decent. Some players just don't fit in at a club.
