Hope he does well for us, and I guess we needed a change ...... but ...... odd appointment (other than he's half Turkish)?
Ah my bad. I guess I’ve confused it with Tim Walter’s official start date? To be fair, we shouldn’t have signed anyone before he’s here anyway. I do think he’ll have a fair few players on his radar who he wants to bring in - as well as a big list from the recruitment team to consider. I’m honestly not panicking in the slightest. But ask me again in 3 weeks.
He was here though, he was appointed midway through June. He can still be involved in discussions on who to sign. He's a Head Coach not a manager.
And let’s face it every coach complains about a player not having a proper pre season when things go wrong
It’s not that we haven’t signed anyone yet, it’s the scale of the rebuild required that’s concerning. We need a minimum of a dozen players (In my opinion) equal or better quality than the team that got us a 7th place finish last season.
Greaves and Philogene going will give us a hell of a budget to do that rebuild though. Our recruitment has got a lot better in the last 12 months compared to the first 18 months or so. I do think we will get some very good players in and will have a good team by 31st August.
There's a downside in having a big budget though(If he spends what comes back our way)? It's fully transparent to Clubs selling to us and could cause inflated prices? It's gonna take some amount of hard work to put all this together in such a short space of time and it takes a huge leap of faith to think we'll be anywhere near ready by the end of August. I'm not being negative,fingers and everything else crossed but it's a monumental task
But I do think this has been in planning for an awfully long time. I had a chat with someone at the club in Feb time and they told me then that Greaves and Philogene were going in the summer if we don't go up because there's already loads of interest in them. They had serious interest in Philogene as far back as Preston at home when he cut inside and scored and that interest was from a 'big European club' although they didn't say who. They've also known there was growing interest in Greaves, especially as he was getting better and better throughout the season. I don't think there's any way they have not had a plan for this exact scenario. If we're being honest, they want to sell them both for FFP anyway. If we kept them, we would have struggled to bring in good quality players with the FFP room we had left. We really did 'go for it' last season to get in the playoffs as they knew if we didn't go up, Greaves and Philogene would leave so we would have some spending room again. If we did go up, we could have tried to convince them to stay. All of the Acun clips of him saying he doesn't want to sell is smoke and mirrors to get the best possible price for them, which is the right thing to do.
Said it before a way to counteract this is if the kinky German brings in a 5-6 players he knows from Germany who will already know his stylee
If this has been planned for a long time we should have been in a position to sign players already, knowing roughly what fees to expect for the pair.
Season starts on the 10th for us though and we need to have some of those good players on board before then, otherwise we could be playing catch up from day 1
It's better but it's still poor. We saved face last year because we signed 4 good young players but it glosses over the fact that we signed 15+ players and only 5/6 worked. I don't see how we can have the same pull with the domestic loans as we did under LR. Why would you come to us instead of Boro, Coventry etc? And considering that counted for most of our better signings, we're in a tough place. Tim is meant to be very good with youngsters but domestically it's going to take time to prove that.
