he's signed a couple of good'uns the other day though. okore is a great prospect and if he gets helenius, he's a very talented striker. no guarantees they'll adapt of course and helenius may struggle to oust benteke. don't know much about the other new lad - bacuna (sp)
Of course I am Supers - it's being so cheerful that keeps me going!! I accept to some extent what you say but why aren't the Managers and Players signed by Villa, Man City, Chelsea etc on holiday? With specific regard to Hooper surely you will accept that, following all the shanagins in Jan, City must know how much they will have to pay to get him and surely it makes sense to just go and get him rather than play it out in public allowing another Club to nip in and get him. As I said I fear that Hughton can't make up his mind whether to buy him and adjust the rest of his transfer targets to fit or whether to buy someone else, such as the Swedish player, and adjust his striking and midfield requirements accordingly. You may put it down to ' getting the best deal possible ' but City must know what Celtic will accept and, if Hooper is the priority signing, they should pay it before someone else does and then work out how much of the budget is left to spend on the rest of the squad and what he can buy for that money. In my opinion he is dithering if he cannot afford both Hooper and the Swede as he needs to bolster other areas of the squad but by leaving his options open he could end up losing both and find himself back to square one with time passing by. As a side issue Supers, you have probably got better imformation than I have but I am told that the transfer budget is not as large as some people are assuming and that having bought Wolfswinkel and Garrido there would be a shortage of funds left if we did buy Hooper.
Can't let you get away with that one mate! That was purely the Wolfswinkel deal instigated by Sporting Lisbon out of the blue. I'm not decrying that deal at all - in fact it was the main reason I renewed my season ticket when I won't be here for 3 months of the season - but whilst I admire the way McNally handled it I cannot think we can take credit for instigating it.
man city don't even have a bloody manager yet! chelsea have signed one player - we have signed two. i don't see your point really. should our manager not be aloud to go on holiday while there is no training and no transfer window open? he doesn't conclude the deals anyway. i'm sure city have a rough i dea how much they can hope to get hooper for but celtic are still adamant they want no less than £7m, therefore its a waiting game. the player and agent will know the score too. you have to take risks in the marketplace - what if we went in at £7m and it got rejected? celtic might feel they could get another £1m on top! with hull showing their hand early on it actually makes our job easier. we are a better proposition than them and they will test the water, see how far they get and then boom, we'll come in and not pay a penny more than we have to. why pay over the odds? if we pay £1m over the odds, that's a million that could have been used on another players wages. what you say about hughton being unable to make his mind up is utterly ridiculous. transfer targets take months to plan - he's not doing it on the hop you know! there is no problem buying both hooper and toivonen as far as i know. he will have other options, possibly redmond may be one) but i really don't get the panic at this stage - we are still weeks away from pre-season training starting and 9 weeks away from the first game. you are however right about the transfer kitty - people (naturally) have got carried away. i believe the kitty is less than £15m (not including RvW who came from last years budget), so we still have plenty to play with, just not as much as some would have hoped for. i assume some money is being kept to one side to help with the stadium restructuring in 12 months time.
Quite a number failed to make the grade? I'm struggling to think of many who didn't make the grade they were bought for. There were some who didn't make the step up when we got promotion but that is a bit different. To be fair all Managers make good and bad signings - amongst all the tat Bryan Gunn bought Holt - but the best managers make fewer mistakes than others.
so what if it was only the RvW deal? it's still money paid out for transfers. and what on earth are you talking about with regards the RvW deal? how did we NOT instigate it?! yes sporting needed the capital but we were prepared to pay it! they didn't think 'lets go running to norwich city'! we obviously found out about the situation there and he will have been a player we scouted and wanted. it was a complex deal (which is probably one of the reasons it wasn't completed in january - that and sporting having a change of heart about the finances) - three different parties owned the player - third party ownership isn't allowed in this country so lots of things needed to be ironed out. you are right to praise mcnally's handling of the deal but why have you then said the club cannot take any credit for it? totally bizarre comment!! early days as he's not played a game for us yet, but on paper, it looks like one of the most outstanding pieces of transfer business for many years by ANY club in this country
Ties in with what I was told Supers - after Garrido £13m left. £6m for Hooper and £4.5m for Toivonen doesn't leave a lot which is why I wonder whether we can afford them both unless we are going to sell and why I am thinking he cannot make up his mind which way to jump. If nothing else it has livened up a quiet Friday afternoon!!!
If Sporting had not needed the money up front would this have happened? No! They would have waited until now and sold him to the highest bidder. I am in full admiration of the way we responded but the deal was instigated by the need of Sporting Lisbon to get money immediately. I don't see that as a bizarrre interpretation of the facts.
In my mind we need to spend the bulk of whatever kitty we have on sharpening up the front line. RvW will hopefully have a significant impact but I think that we need at least one more starting quality player in the forward line. Whilst I think that GH and RvW would be pretty compatible as a strike partnership I am concerned that Holty's star is waning and we can't expect 38 games a season from him and after those two we have Becchio and Vaughan neither of whom CH rates at all. We have quality and cover in goal and whilst another LB would be ideal I think the defence is acceptable. I would like to see us spend to get a decent playmaker and a forward - Hooper would suit me fine and if we only managed to get two quality players good enough for the first team then that would be fine by me, particularly if it allowed the stadium development to go ahead next year.
CH doesn't rate Becchio? He only bought him 5 months ago!! Surely, as with Tettey, we have got to see how he shapes up next year after a full Premiership pre-season training and preparation? Not as convinced as you are about adequate cover at full back but agree that Vaughan is on his way - a few quid in the transfer kitty?
but it was still us who instigated the transfer! sporting were certainly desperate for money but we approached them, not the other way around!!
one national newspaper ran with that story. celtic said they only received bids from norwich in january. spurs may have come in with an enquiry or something but they didn't bid for him. i doubt they were ever interested - and the story was written by a spurs supporting journo i believe, who was probably pretty desperate to see his side sign a bloody striker!
nobody knows if hughton rates becchio but i have heard murmurs that he wasn't quite the player we thought we were getting (don't know what that means really - you can all make up your own minds what it means!) we need another left back urgently in my opinion. we need another striker (hooper probably), left sided winger and/or versatile attacking midfielder (toivonen or a n other) and a holding player if possible but i doubt this will be possible this summer - may have to wait for the following year when we can spend more money on a cracker. i do agree with norfolkbhoy that the bulk of our funds should go on improving our attacking options - there will be a few bosmans about no doubt and it may be that we dip into a lower league for a couple fo players, just to get us through another year. we won't see the finished article next season, that's for sure (not that you EVER see the finished article, but you know what i'm getting at!)
Who said our budget was only £15mil? I think it will be bigger than last seasons and last season's was roughly £15mil.
oh, it will be bigger! but he won't spend it all in january - he'll save at least £5m for january. i'm told our budget is just under £20m for transfers and more than £26m in total if you include wages, but you can take a chunk of that out for the summer window ps. actually that's not true - i haven't been told that at all, but i have had indicated to me a rough guide and it falls within those figures - i've just rounded them off a bit
Two youngsters signed by Lambert in League 1: Oli Johnson and Anthony McNamee. I don't believe they were signed simply for life in League 1. They were signed as prospects and expected to develop into Championship players. They didn't. The Lambert signings who did the business for us were actually the more experienced players -- Russell Martin, Zak Whitbread, Elliott Ward, Simeon Jackson (a Canadian international at senior level despite playing for Gillingham at the time) and so on. I agree that all managers make mistakes, but that includes Lambert.
I don't get how he can't be quite the player we thought we were getting. It's hardly as if we signed Ali Dia! We must have had plenty of scouts seeing him, we knew his style of football, etc. If that comment is referring to his attitude, well, it takes managerial skill to keep a player's attitude on the right path and I would have thought Hughton, of all managers, would have known that. I'm not convinced. I think Becchio wasn't played because we were on a very bad run and Hughton (rightly or wrongly) didn't want to upset the team or the formation and when it got more pressured as we got closer to relegation it made no sense to bring him in. It sounds like Becchio had a strop at one point, and he certainly wasn't helped by Hughton's obsession with very, very late substitutions such that by the time we could afford to play him he was no longer really match fit. None of that means he "wasn't quite the player we thought". It just means he needs a full pre-season and some game time. We should remember he cost us very little, offers us a Plan B and is a clinical finisher even if he's not the most brilliant player in the world. I think he has a real future with us. A front line choice of Holt, RvW, Hooper and Becchio would offer us four completely different styles of player, which I think is a great position to be in and if they are all kept match fit it keeps opponents guessing.
True, but there are two sorts of mistakes: (1) mistakes; and (2) expensive mistakes. Lambert is very good at avoiding (2). A lot of the time with (1) it is just a case of them not settling properly.
