I think claiming that Cairney would be good in the Premiership is inaccurate. Based on nothing. Hernandez has been terrible apart from his start. However, i don't know if we just have the ability of finding complete tosh or Brucey doesn't know how to attack. I believe we were one of the lowest scoring teams to obtain automatic promotion. (not based on evidence, grapevine ****)
I don't know about overall goals, but it's likely because when we got promoted it was the first time since the introduction of the playoffs that no automatically promoted side had a top scorer with 10 goals or more (Koren was top scorer, and our top striker I think had 4).
Based on seeing Cairney play the games he did against Man City and Chelsea in the space of a week the first time we were in the PL it's pretty undeniable that he has the ability to be a PL player. He pretty much ran the midfield in both games (I remember after them saying that even without the other issues I'd pick him ahead of Bullard), and against Man City he was up against the physical games of Viera, De Jong, and Gareth Barry and held his own, I'm sure at one point after Viera came on they'd doubled up on him as it was the only way they could deal with him.
The question mark was always would did he have the attitude to be able to consistently play like that, because the really frustrating thing with him here was he'd have games like those and then go all powder puff for others for no apparent reason. He's gone to Blackburn and done well there by having regular football and he's obviously developed a more consistent game.
On the one hand you can say that's been a mistake by us to sell him as he's now developed that consistency, on the other you can say he wouldn't have played ahead of Huddlestone and Livermore last season, and had they been fit this season Snodgrass and Diame would have been ahead as well. So how would he have got the regular football to develop his game into what it is? Certainly for this season you wouldn't have hung onto him as 5th or 6th choice in central midfield in anticipation of 2 season ending injuries and 2 players crashing and burning compared to last season. (and still Quinn and Meyler to get past to get in the team).
In terms of us finding dross or not when it comes to going forward. Last summer we signed 4 midfielders with the intention of making us a more creative side. Snodgrass got injured on his debut, Diame got injured and didn't really play again after October (I'm not counting rushing him back and finding he was still injured as him playing again), Ramirez was struggling with niggly things all season, and Ben Arfa was Ben Arfa. 2 of those are obviously unlucky, Ramirez was worth the gamble as if after 10-15 games he'd got over his problems he'd have been a good player for us, and BA was undoubtedly the best player amongst them but we got it wrong in thinking his attitude issue was to do with Pardew being a twat more than him being one himself. Personally I think knowing Snodgrass was out, signing Diame and hoping that 1 of the other 2 would pay off was a reasonable move to make, it just didn't work out.
