Sorry, got sidetracked. Medel? Good player and he would suit our set up far better than the one at Cardiff last season as we have superior players and retain the ball better. I have always wanted a footballing ball winner, so not averse to the thought but where/how would he fit in?
James Rodriguez is way out of our league. Medel I would take if we could get him for £5-7.5m. As others have said he's committed in the tackle, has defensive instincts, is technically good and keeps things simple. Would suit us much better than Cardiff. Ivor re: where to fit him.... I'd play him anchor man in midfield....alternating with Leon in our usual set up. Would play the 2 together against stronger opposition. I've been thinking of how to develop our formation options...this most probably won't happen of course (Monk seems to like the diamond as an alternative formation) but I'd like to see us develop a formation that uses 3 at the back; ---------------------------- Fabianski ------------------------------ -------------- Chico ----- Ash/Amat ------- Ben Davies -------- --------------------- Leon ---------- Medel (or alternative) ---- ------------------------------ Shelvey ------------------------------ Dyer/Pablo -------------------------------------------- Routledge ----------------------- Gomis -------- Bony ------------------------ .....for this to work the 2 holding midfielders need to be filling the holes and snuffing out the danger. Medel would be perfect as he can also drop in at CB if young Ben Davies (or Chico as is his want) goes forward. In this formation Shelvey (or De Guzman or Ki) is the playmaker and the onus is on him getting forward. We still have width. We fit in the 2 strikers. If Ash doesn't sign an extension play Amat. If Ash signs on we could play Amat instead of Ben Davies on occasion....possibly with Ben playing more as a left midfielder than a winger. What do you reckon? Any holes in the ship?
Agree ivor. Medel has been a bit of a star at the world cup and is too good for championship football, he needs a good premiership club like us or the saints to develop further.
Dalman has gone public and said we don't have to, nor will we sell Medel at a loss. That means that assuming we did actually pay the reported 13M Euros for him, someone would have to stump up over £10M to get him. Is he worth that? In todays UK Prem market where someone like Luke Shaw can fetch over £30M, Medel would be a steal.
Only that a rookie keeper ( in the Swansea sense ) and Amat taking charge at the back with Chico who does tend to wander may create more problems than either Leon or Medel could mange .We do need options to change it around a bit and now atm we have the players to accommodate so it'll be interesting on how it's managed
The insanity that drives the P.L. transfer fees ever upwards, means that Medel will probably be somewhere in the £10-15 million range. He impressed many in Brazil,and from the little I saw of him,I would have to concur. He surely won't want to spend any playing time in The Championship with Cardiff,and I would expect several more attractive Clubs,including The Swans', to vie for his signature..
I see where you are coming from with the defence....I still like the look of it though. There are diamonds and triangles everywhere....it would allow us to play 2 genuine strikers and still have numbers in midfield....we would retain the width....and, this is something I've been thinking of for a while, why do we persist with back 4s or 5s when most teams these days only play 1 up front and try to play between the lines? This system would mean that 1 striker up top would be man marked by 1 of the back 3 with the other 2 covering the runners (most likely coming from wide). The 2 anchor men protecting the back 3 fill the space between the lines and turn over lots of ball while if we had someone like Medel there he could slot in to the back where required. e.g. A diagonal ball is played to the right winger who has found some space out wide....LCB goes out to meet him...Medel slots into the back line meaning we have 3 CBs in the box with Leon in front of them and Shelvey tracking back. When we win the ball back we return to our shape and can counter attack quick as we have 2 wingers and 2 strikers on the pitch looking to break. It would be tough to implement it definitely. It would take some excellent defensive coaching and the 3 at the back and the 2 screening would need to be players with brains who think quick on their feet (must be able to spot danger early)....but if we could pull it off I think we would make great strides. Also, if we tried this and it went well....and we start home games in this formation....If we have to protect a lead or a good point we could sub off the wingers and bring on Rangel and Taylor as wing backs.
James Rodriguez was bought by Monaco for 45 million euros last summer. No chance. This kid isn't a newcomer or a secret in world football. The British press just didn't track him because he moved from a Portuguese side to a French side. Not high profile enough for our back pages. As for Medel, I'd take him. But I'd use him extremely sparingly at CB. When you have teams like West Ham and Newcastle lumping the ball up to their big men up top, it's a little different to defending against teams that like to keep it on the ground like in the World Cup. Sam Allardyce would single out Carroll vs Medel at CB and have no end of joy through lofting balls at head height. Not a season-long option at CB in the Premier League, he would mostly be employed at CDM.
Quote "It would be tough to implement it definitely. It would take some excellent defensive coaching and the 3 at the back and the 2 screening would need to be players with brains who think quick on their feet (must be able to spot danger early)….but if we could pull it off I think we would make great strides." Has Garry the nous atm to attempt such a radical change , good defender who imo read the game well therefore has something to offer coaching wise to the defensive back line .Leon as we know reads the game well and watching Medel's recent performances I'd have to say the same ,is Leon going to continue much longer as 1st name on the team sheet so it may mean another like minded player being brought in to accommodate along side Medel (hypothetically )
I agree on Rodriguez. Almost spat my tea out when I saw that suggestion. Only about 4 clubs in the PL could even come close to affording him, and no, we're not one of them.
(From Scott Swan's site...) Should Swansea gazump Inter Milan for Cardiff's Gary Medel? "Inter are rumoured to be stalling over an £8million fee for the Chilean, and the Swans need a defensive midfielder... Four and a half years ago Huw Jenkins made a seemingly tongue-in-cheek enquiry about Jay Bothroyd (then Cardiff's top scorer - he's now playing in Thailand! Mad!). The response? Bothroyd himself had a pop at Huw in the press, and chairman Peter Ridsdale said he "wouldn't expect any of his players to go 'down the road' ", adding that he thought Huw had done it simply for the publicity. For his part, our dear chairman wasn't to be drawn on the matter - only commenting that "Bothroyd isn't a player who'd be in our price range". How times have changed. The Swans are about to embark on a fourth straight season in the Premier League and Cardiff, predictably, came up, spent loads of money, and promptly got relegated. Buying success is a lottery, and sadly for Cardiff fans spending big wasn't enough to keep them up. The danger of signing big is that if you get relegated it's going to be almost impossible to hold onto your star players - Steven Caulker, for example, has already departed for QPR in order to return to the Premier League but it's another of their signings, Gary Medel, who would suit the Swans down to the ground. We're obviously in the market for a central midfielder, and as yesterday's blog showed (link) we've probably spent about £2.5million net in the transfer market this summer. If my Premier League revenue maths is correct we should have at least ten million pound left in the transfer kitty - and that's without even worrying about how much we're spending. The amount of money you now receive for TV rights means that pretty much all Premier League clubs are able to spend upwards of ten million every transfer window, and considering the Swans' general financial prudence it's hard to imagine we aren't considerably better off than most. This is an opportunity to make a statement. It doesn't matter if Medel fancies Inter and doesn't fancy moving down the M4 - it's a statement of intent. Cardiff's chairman has said Medel won't be leaving for any less than £10million - surely we could afford that? It's not even like it's a risk in my opinion - Medel is quality. Real quality. He bossed the first derby against us last season, was excellent in general for Cardiff, and would really suit our style of play. He's shown for Chile the short-passing game comes naturally to him, and on top of that we are in the market for a defensive midfielder - as our bid for Muhammed Besic showed. Medel is surely currently a better player than Besic, and £10million isn't really that much for a defensive midfielder of Medel's calibre. Hell, if Inter Milan are interested... On top of this, it's an opportunity to step up a notch in the eyes of the football world. Last week we saw French winger Dmitri Payet turn down the Swans - essentially saying we're not a big enough club. Even if we didn't end up getting Medel, the fact that we tried to gazump a major, major club would still make a point that we're a force to be reckoned with - we signed Bony for twelve last summer so why should this be any different? The obvious sticking point would be whether Cardiff would be prepared to sell to Swansea. I've racked my brain to try and think of the last time a player turned down a move to a club based on his allegiance to their rival, or a club turned down a bid from a rival for nothing other than historic reasons. I'm struggling to come up with any! A sign of the times, perhaps. Either way, it'd be interesting to see what Cardiff's reaction to a bid from their nearest and dearest was this time around. One thing is for sure - we won't have to worry about Cardiff pricing us out of a move. We could probably even afford to give them a tip..."
If Medel is available and is a fit for our current needs then we should bid our estimation of his value (probably under that and negotiate up perhaps). It doesn't matter whether we are big or small, we are in the Prem. Medel could be starting games regularly for us. If Cardiff don't like the color of our money too bad. But, it gives Medel's agent something to think about and perhaps the player may have a bias towards the Prem versus Serie A or against something in the Inter setup that works to our advantage. If you don't ask, you won't get.
This would be a great buy. He's quality and would fit in well. As an added bonus us buying their best player would really annoy them up the road. I agree with the blog that we've only laid out about £2.5m already but surely we have a lot more than £10m left.
