Ross Stewart

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The real failing isn't taking a risk by signing him in the first place. Of course, with hindsight, the risk didn't pay off but he is clearly a very good player and you can see why the club took the risk.

The real failing is that 2 years and several serious injuries later, we went into this season relying on him as our first choice striker with no suitable back up as a lone striker.... made even worse by the fact we spent £7-8m on a striker we clearly feel is one for the future.
 
Interestingly, the 2023 "muscle" injury was also his hamstring so that's now 5 hamstring injuries he's had.


Another thing that needs to be taken into account is that it's not unusual for a major injury like an achilles or ACL to degenerate over time or for a major injury to lead to further injuries because the player slightly changes the way they move after they recover from the "main" injury and their body needs time to adapt.

There's no way we'll ever know but why assume the medical team didn't pick that up? They wouldn't make the final decision on a signing. The video below with Gary Lewin (the ex Arsenal physio) is very interesting on medicals. Assuming he's talking about Overmars, that was close to 30 years ago so the technology will be much improved today. My guess is the medical team saw what was going on, gave our management/recruitment team that information and they decided to sign Stewart anyway. To be fair, from the little we've seen of him he does look like a good player but it's proved to be a dreadful signing.

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yeah could well have been that the medical team raised concerns and they were ignored because Martin wanted him, or could be they missed it. However you look at it it’s a signing that has aged poorly
 
The real failing isn't taking a risk by signing him in the first place. Of course, with hindsight, the risk didn't pay off but he is clearly a very good player and you can see why the club took the risk.

The real failing is that 2 years and several serious injuries later, we went into this season relying on him as our first choice striker with no suitable back up as a lone striker.... made even worse by the fact we spent £7-8m on a striker we clearly feel is one for the future.

Why do you think Downs is one they “clearly feel is for the future”?
 
Why do you think Downes is one they “clearly feel is for the future”?
He never starts and even when we didn't have Stewart he played very little. It seems like they bought him with a view to giving him minutes here and there but that he wouldn't be starting much. Either that or they only realised he was crap after wasting £8m on him! Neither are a good look.
 
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He never starts and even when we didn't have Stewart he played very little. It seems like they bought him with a view to giving him minutes here and there but that he wouldn't be starting much. Either that or they only realised he was crap after wasting £8m on him! Neither are a good look.

Possibly, I just think he’s seen as not as good as Stewart or Archer so was always going to be a squad type player. You could argue that signing a striker better than those two in the Championship was a pretty tough task so we signed a younger player to rotate in with them.

The question for me is whether or not Still will adjust to play to Archers strengths. If he won’t then not signing another big forward makes no sense at all. Keeping Archer makes no sense at all.
 
I think the issue with Archer isn't actually Archer.

He's never going to win an aerial duel with the majority of championship defenders as he's too short so don't lump it up to him.

He also doesn't seem the type of player who's going to already be in the box waiting for the cross to come in.

So right now he needs players to thread it through the defence so that he can run onto it and at present the person who's supposed to be doing that is Azaz and he's not firing on all cylinders at the moment either.

It's on WS to sort out as if we spend all day lumping it up to archer we won't be winning any time soon.
 
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