Do you guys actually have a leader on the pitch? You guys know more about your squad than I would. Who is your current captain? Its always worth keeping around experienced players in your squad, even if they aren't first XI quality any more. John Terry (as much as anyone might hate him), is still in our squad because a) He is still a pretty decent player, but also because b) He is an older, experienced head to take the younger players under his wing. It's also why Gerrard stuck around at Liverpool for so long, when he was at least 2 years past his sell by date. You guys seem to flog everyone as soon as they hit their late 20's.
If anything, the fact that the club is not a Sugga Daddy FC etc and run soundly is probably the reason that of those players in your list who have not given the ROI for their buyers, very few of them are Spurs players. If the revenues do increase (new WHL etc) , I hope we don't increase our ratio to match the usual suspects.
I think this is an issue for us but I can't see how to solve it. With club legends like Terry and Gerrard you can see how it works but we have not had someone like that since Ledley King and I'm not sure signing someone else's legend is going to work with our manager's playing style.
He is not a leader and does very little if not scoring. I don't think its a coincidence that Sunderland are bottom despite his goals....
I agree, it is hit and miss for every club. But when you don't have the money, getting it 'spot on' is far more likely if you get the business done early in the window and avoid the farcical tragicomedies that plague us every year. Episodes like Berahino and Sissoko prove my point - if you're still pissing about at 11.30pm on deadline day with wads of cash in your pockets, what on earth do you think will happen?! Not only have you taken a massive risk and probably vastly overspent on a player, but that same player has also had no pre-season with your club! I'm not sure how to look at this differently. I'm not demanding perfection; I am demanding common sense and a logical strategy - both of which Levy seems to abandon every summer.
Dawson? You sold him for like £3m right? To Hull. Not worth flogging him for that kind of cash, would have been more worth it keeping him around. The presence of someone like that can gee up the younger players quite a lot, only got to look at what Terry and Gerrard have done over the years, to pull their teams out of the mire in games. Not really sure how well his skills have kept up with age, but for £3m, not really worth losing him.
Poch just threw Sissoko under the bus... "Football is not about money. It is about players being better, and that they show on the training ground that they are better than another team-mate and that they deserve to be involved or not. In my opinion, I need to take the decisions and I believe that the players that started in the game [on Saturday] and the players on the bench deserved to be involved in the game. There’s nothing else to [read into] it. "It’s not frustrating for me. It’s about football. We can see in football different things that happen. You sign a player and then you expect something, and you don’t find what you expected … If another deserved to be involved, like maybe [Georges-Kévin] Nkoudou or Josh Onomah, or [Vincent] Janssen, then why not? Just because we pay money [for someone], do they deserve to play? Sissoko needs to work hard and to show in future that he deserves to be on the team."
Does Poch sign your players like Arsene does at Arsenal, or is there a DoF type role that finds the player types Poch asks for and then hashes out the deal, like Rodgers when he was at Liverpool?
I don't think that it's Defoe's fault that Sunderland are in that position. He basically kept them up last season. Having a player like him would give us an additional option in a position that we lack diversity in. I wouldn't start him regularly if we still had him, but he'd give us something different and be a good substitute in many situations. He has pace, works well in a pairing and is a constant goal threat. Kane and Janssen are our only possibilities at the moment and it's rather limiting. They're both good players, but don't complement each other well and the Dutchman's confidence looks low at the moment. Having a pacy, experienced player that knows the club well would be beneficial.
I don't think it is his fault exactly, but Defoe doesn't add much to the team apart from his good goalscoring record. I don't see him much different to Darren Bent - to quote you, I think, it is like playing with ten men and getting one goal awarded randomly every 2.5 games.
Defoe works a lot harder than Bent, but his strengths aren't that appropriate for the lone striker, in my opinion. He's improved on aspects of his game, but he still doesn't hold the ball up that well and he's too short to win too many headers. It suits him to be part of a pairing on in a side that are on the front foot for most of the game. Neither are true in his current side.
So you think we should have paid the asking price for Berahino at the start of that window? How do you think that would have turned out? I assume with Sissoko that we missed out on several other targets and decided that him in the squad was better than having the money in the bank. Might have been a bad call but not farcical
That's a kind way of saying that he doesn't have all the skills needed of a modern striker....I get why people like him because he is exciting to watch, but that doesn't make him a player we need. Dawson is another nearly man. If you wanted a guy to work hard for the team then no-one better. If you needed someone to make a last ditch tackle on Aguero, I doubt he is in the top 100.
Signing someone that has all the skills required of the modern striker would be extremely expensive. As we don't need to replace Kane, signing someone who offers something different and can complement him is preferable. It would give us something different and allow us to have an effective Plan B. The same applies to Dawson. We've got Alderweireld and Vertonghen, so we need decent back-up. Carter-Vickers has a lot of potential, by all accounts, but he's still not playing, so the manager can't think that he's ready. Loaning him out and replacing him with an experienced defender that knows the league and the club would've made sense.
In Power's list above is Martial. We were heavily linked with him- how has that turned out? As was said, teams like United just say meh. Martial, Memphis, Depay of recent history. There is no magic formula to getting it right. Who else was in for Sisokou-Everton. A club in a similar position to us. Top top clubs don't want him, and for whatever reason (good showing at Euro's) he became sought after but was too expensive for lesser clubs. Shane Long: yes he has only played at 4 medium clubs, but to come to us would be a step up, he would be willing to sit on the bench and could contribute.If he would have played at a top club , would he now be interested in coming to us? Loads were calling for Charlie Austin-but he like Long has only played at mediocre clubs.
I think he wants to make the signings going forward. Until recently we had the guy from Southampton Paul Mitchell and before that Baldini but it was never clear to me who did what. Last I heard we were not going to replace Mitchell.
