The incremental £10m was disclosed for fees and wages, but do we feel we are pushing up against the limit now with snoddy, turner, garrido and bas song (those four must have burnt the best part of 10m) and there is talk of further incomings? I know we have sold / released a couple, but My gut feel is have we changed the goalposts again? Maybe the 10m loan / interest payment we said we would commit to will be deferred Intersting stuff
we won't have deferred the bank payments. that was written in stone and i don't think people realise just what a massive favour the banks did for us in 2010. without it, we'd have gone bust. we told them that we'd pay them every penny by the end of our second season in the premier league and that's what they will do. it's been budgeted for and its not an issue - we paid around £4m last season and its another £8m this year (these are estimates). none of us actually know for sure how much money was available for the course of the 2012-13 season. i hazard a guess it was around the £12m mark - it could be more, i doubt its less. the goal posts won't have changed - why would they? cos of one bad result?? that won't have changed a thing. so if they have changed it will only be because of fresh investment and i think we'd have heard something about that by now. if we assume roughly we've spent £8m on turner (£1.5m), bassong (3m), snodgrass (£2.5m), butterfield (£1m), whittaker (£0m), that gives us probably £4m+. i don't know if wages are factored in or not but as we don't know what the budget was and its all guess work its irrelevant really! easy to see why we've not invested heavily in a new centre forward and easy to see why we're looking for a couple of loans to add more quality.
it will be around £2.5m with the rest in add-ons. doubt its quite £4m, it seems its probably closer to £3.5m in total assuming those add-ons are fulfilled. we'd have been told our record transfer had been broken if it were more than £3.5m anyway, even if they never disclosed the exact amount!
With Vaughan now on loan to Huddersfield we have 4 strikers left namely Holt (17 goals), Morison (10 goals), Jackson (5 goals?) and C Martin ( 7 in Championship?). Only Holt and Morison have decent scoring records so I hope that the budget will stretch to another striker. Or are we going down the one striker plus support from midfield path? Didn't work at Fulham. I really can't see with the existing strikers that we have that we are going to score many goals this season so it could be that Hughton is going for few goals scored against us to compensate for the potential lack of goals. Didn't work at Fulham.
nothing worked at fulham because a) every single player who started the match played poorly; b) the balance of the team was wrong; and c) fulham were much better than us and played very well. you've just listed 30 goals (jackson got 3) from three strikers - these players are capable of scoring goals, even jackson if given the game time. people are going to have to accept that we aren't going to play all-out-attack anymore. we are going to be far more structured and disciplined and once the balance is found, ie when we have that holding player, things will begin to shape up. goals will be expected to come from midfield - howson, surman, pilkington, snodgrass, hoolahan... all these players score goals. hopefully we will bring another forward in but there are already plenty of goals in that team. the two controversial loanees we've relinquished this summer, ayala and vaughan, played about 10 games between them last season, scoring 0 goals. we lost wilbraham, who scored 1 goal. we lost whitbread who scored 0 goals. we've actually added goal threat, not taken any away. as i say, its all about getting the balance right between attack and defence and that hasn't been discovered yet - it may take a while to get it sorted so we all need to be patient.
Supers I was only suggesting a minor change in the goal posts, to push it up a bit (the spending) to help us stay up. Obviously we need to leave some in the pot for jan
oh right. well even so, i still don't think there has been any changes - its just hughton has taken more time to figure out what he needs and to spend the money
