Lokilo is as good as you’re going to get for a squad player. He was perfect to come off the bench for Rosie as he never lost the ball, didn’t take many risks and worked hard.
But as a winger in a system where we needed to rely on crosses, he was pretty poor (27% success rate) at finding somebody. He was, like you say, brought in as cheap cover, but I thought it was quite clear after a couple of games that he was out of his depth and again, if we are serious about promotion, you want to be able to bring on players that can change the game.
Last season we went behind in 24 games. That's a hell of a statistic, we literally spent half the season behind in games. Now, if you get to the 60th minute and you need to change your formation because you are chasing the game, who would you rather bring on? Lokilo and Docherty, or Omur and Tufan? It's no contest.
At the start of the season, we had players like Lokilo, Simons, Docherty and Sellars-Fleming as our options on the bench. It didn't exactly scream quality in depth. Those aren't bad players, but they aren't gamechangers, they aren't going to come on and offer a different threat to what was already on the pitch.
When we played Stoke at home, they brought on Vidigal, Baker and Ennis, who allowed them to change the game and see it out. We couldn't adapt and lost. Ironically, in that game we had Tufan, Abdush, Connolly, Sharp and Morton come on, which is much better (Sharp aside), but the first half of the season we had nothing like that and now that three of those have gone, we need to bring in players of that quality again to provide those options.