My main concern is that from the 31st January 2012 we needed at least one striker and, possibly more importantly, one centre back (minimum - we obviously needed full backs as well). We are now approaching an entire year and still have no-one remotely close to coming. You cannot tell me that Loic Remy was and always has been Plan A? He was £20m in the Summer, known for his tantrums and just plain out of our league, so we can never have considered him. Sure, when a £20m player is then worth £8m you can go knocking, but how in the name of all that is holy was this Plan A? So my major concern now is there's not really been a Plan A at all. Graham Carr has been there unearthing two things - rough diamonds (many of whom remain unpolished) and discovering ropey contracts (Cabaye, Ben Arfa). What we don't seem to have been doing is identifying shortfalls in our squad and aggressively addressing them. I'm no scout, but here's a list of strikers all of whom should be able to improve on Shola/Ranger....
De Jong - Sow - Yedder - Aubameyang - Alain Traore - van Wolfswinkel - Ben Basat - Finnbogason - Bonno Wilfried - Adam Szalai.
All I did was search for top scorers in domestic leagues (Dutch/French/German). All have excellent records, all are sub 26 years of age, all play for arguably smaller (financially) teams than NUFC. They have one more thing in common - not one of them will be coming to the Toon. We could all do this, we could go to South America, Belgium, Spain, Italy, North America, Africa and pull lists of names of people, have a look on FM2012 or YouTube and make a rough judgement call whether or not they're worth watching. With a Prem budget, we could fairly quickly get them scouted. I cannot for the life of me fathom what's difficult about any of this, yet we seem to screw around, procrastinate and do nothing.
So far, January has seen us replace Simpson with Debuchy (in all but physical presence) and attempt to replace Ba with Remy. Where's the CB we desperately, desperately need? What are we looking at a 20 year left back for - the sceptical mind wanders to the sale of Santon here. Where are the two strikers? If we want youth to flourish, why has Campbell not appeared since November? If we want to adopt a different playing style and need AM's, then where are they??
As usual with the Toon, more questions than answers. And, as usual, absolute silence from the club.