repman

I think he's choosing his words very carefully isn't he? If he moaned about the decision he would get fined/suspended himself right?

It's felt to me all season that we've been on the wrong side of the ref more often than not. I'm sure that I am probably blinkered in that view but this sort of thing just kicks you in the teeth even more. The Sheff U game at home in particular stands out, felt like we were playing by different rules to them. Lots on here saying the same sort of thing as when Sainz got sent off at Boro, yes don't let them make a decision but it just feels like the wrong one. This has already been appealed so the FA disagree. Any clip of an incident slowed down makes it look much more intentional than it is. I wonder just how close Knapper and Thorup are to blowing it all up in January.

Feel like this sort of ignores how the transfer market has changed since then though. Webber didn't have that money to spend but if we could have signed some of the players he did for the fees he did then we would have done that. Alternatively we could have signed even better, more ready now players with more money available. Those first few years under Webber were a time where if you knew what to look for you could extract serious value out of the market. It's what we did alongside clubs like Brighton, Brentford and on a higher level, Liverpool. It didn't take long for everyone to catch on and that combined with covid and Brexit made everything more expensive while limiting the pool of players you could actually bring in. The move to the South American market was smart but in the championship I'm not sure we will ever have enough money to make it worth it in terms of accessing high end talent. The fees to sign any proven player now is astronomical, and the return on investment just isn't there. Vrancic, Stiepermann, Pukki all great examples of how we beat the market then, and even though we didn't get a fee back for any of them we put so little down in the first place that there was plenty of value in the moves. That's what brings us to now, where it seems to me there are only really 2 viable paths (even with new investment the financial rules will restrict any crazy spending). These paths are basically at opposite ends of a spectrum. On one hand you can invest in young players and hope for gradual improvement across seasons, where you will sell players along the way but that allows you to keep improving across the board. The other way is to go old, sign players who are experienced and come relatively cheap in terms of upfront fees, this can make sense if you think you're close to promotion but it only serves to shorten your window for that chance. Obviously we know last year we went with the second option. I don't think Webber and Wagner particularly had the patience for the other approach, especially considering Webber had already handed in his notice and Wagner generally seemed to prefer his experienced options. We've now swung back the other way, and quite dramatically so too, I don't think we will always be signing players who are most 20 or below, there's pretty much no championship side using as many u21 players as we are at the minute but not every single one of those players will leave so some will graduate into more experienced contributors. This way of operating is certainly a gamble, even more so if we will keep spending fees like the Crnac one on young players who we hope we've found before their true breakout. Also it wouldn't shock me to find out that a lot of this is being driven by ownership, as it feels remarkably similar to the way Attanasio has the Brewers operate.

I think it will be more of the latter, and for me that would be the right move to make. Provided we don't lose all our midfield at once again I think we should have enough to make the playoffs. I'd only be tempted by loans if it felt like we needed players to help get us up automatically, the playoffs are usually enough of a lottery to say that being there is enough of a chance. As the squad stands if we could get out from Hanley and Fassnacht in January I probably would do, they are at best backups now. Whoever comes in instead may not currently be as good but should at least be in a spot to contribute for years to come and it'd take quite a big injury crisis for them to be relied upon in the back half of this season.

Statistically Gunn was even better in 22/23, his per 90 rate was over double what it was last season. I do think there's always a concern with keepers when they start getting injuries that they might never rediscover their form. It felt to me that is what happened to Krul and you probably can't rule it out with Gunn. That being said he's still got quite a small sample size for this year and I'd probably back him to turn it around over the rest of the year. He was poor to start the year and made a few errors but I don't think he's been particularly at fault for any goals recently, it's certainly night and day when compared to Long.

To be fair their squad lacked any potential PL players last season (bar Hutchinson on loan) and even then a lot of them I wouldn't even class as top end champs players. In the summer they signed a lot of those players that they lacked, and did it from championship sides. Delap will definitely leave, Hutchinson likely will but the rest will end up sticking around. I do think you can definitely question whether they got value for money, they made 11 signings from teams in this country. They'll probably make the money back on the 2 mentioned but they spent a good 20 million+ on wingers like Clarke, Szmodics and Ogbene. They're all older than Sainz who we got on a free. Their recruitment strategy is basically the complete opposite to ours, where we sign players from just about wherever they like to stay closer to home, maybe that's deliberate in that they don't want to put up with the time a player may take to bed in but that means you'll have to be willing to spend more.

Onel was good when he came on but he sort of takes up the space Stacey likes to attack. If Stacey will remain in the side then I'd keep Forson out there for now, once Sargent is back then Crnac will be the clear option you'd think.

Plenty can't show patience for young players coming out of the academy so I think you're asking for too much there.

The recruitment team is pretty much exactly as built out by Webber. The replacement cycle is natural as you say, but would you have pegged Sainz as a likely 20 goal player this time last year? I don’t think there were too many people believing Sargent would become what he has in his first season at the club. Sara didn’t start a league game in central midfield until December. These things can take time and all our best players now have replaced some of our best players from before. The recruitment team (as I said built out by Webber) have been doing this for years now. I don’t understand why people want to suddenly doubt them. We sign young players, and sell the best 1 or 2 every summer. This has pretty much been the strategy every year since Webber first joined, bar last season. My view has always been that the transfer business has remained broadly good but we’ve lacked over recent seasons in terms of coaching. I wasn’t a huge fan of the style of last summer’s recruitment as for every action there is an equal and opposite one. By shifting older we would have to end up going the other way dramatically sooner rather than later. Promotion could’ve maybe delayed the process but that never seemed like a probably outcome to me.

I think this year is a rebuilding year, but that doesn't preclude us from being successful at the same time. It's not like in American sports where being bad can be beneficial, as you'll be rewarded with a high draft pick. If we do badly we will get relegated, which only causes more problems. The club is going to try to replicate what Brentford did, which is rooted in the idea that football is a weak link sport. Improving the squad overall will lead to greater results, rather than focusing on star players. Brentford lost their top scorer from both the 18/19 and 19/20 seasons yet improved year on year. Obviously we did similar going into 18/19 without Maddison and Murphy. We tried going all in last year and we found ourselves coming up short. With the financial rules as they are it doesn't seem sensible to keep doubling down on that strategy. Take a look at the league table right now, the top 4 sides all have a younger average age than us, and make up the top 5 (Stoke being the other one). We're not too far off, and actually I think that stat covers up the fact that our squad is maybe in a way younger, as those 4 sides basically don't play a player over the age of 30, whereas we have 3/4 players who are 32 at least which will drag that statistic up. Ignoring that aside, all those teams lost important players over the summer, Leeds are down 50 goals and assists from losing Rutter and Summerville. Another point I'd makes is look at last summer's transfer business, the 2 youngest players signed are the ones who have made the biggest leap this year (Sainz and Fisher). Imagine if we had signed 3 or 4 more of those types, maybe we wouldn't have been as good last year but you'd hope they could contribute more than Fassnacht, Forshaw, Barnes and Batth will this season. As a wise man once said 'football's an infinite game'. He left the club around this time last year.

I've said this before but I'm willing to give Crnac the benefit of the doubt because I think our recruitment team is good at what they do. Every player needs time to adapt to new surroundings and a new league. Sainz last year didn't start a game until December, Sara only nailed down his place around this time of year 2 seasons ago. Both of those players were older and had played at better levels than Crnac has. He was definitely signed to contribute this year but I don't think the plan was for him to start all but one game since he joined, even if he was meant to be first choice the loss of Kamara and then the injury issues meant we've had to rely on him when he ideally should've been eased out for a time like Forson was. You've also got the fact that he's now playing up front. I think anyone can see why people may view him as a striker long term but right now he just doesn't have the physicality to match up to a lot of Championship backlines, conversely he is still our best physical option with the players out. He's basically the inverse of the Sargent out wide in the PL experiment, Crnac has good technical ability and looks far more comfortable facing forwards than with his back to goal. Also worth saying that he's still 20 and he will grow into his body in the next couple of years, just look at Sargent when he arrived compared to now. Will be interesting to see what JHT does on Tuesday, you'd expect us to have a lot of the ball vs Plymouth so whoever plays up front might not be needed for an out ball like today.

The big issue with Long for me is that we seem to have conceded the first chance the opposition have every time. A lot of them I would say were half chances at best too. It's cliche to say goals change games but that has reallly hurt us I think. Especially in the last 2 games before the break.

Another graph here that shows Kenny in similar light, while also showing just how much we miss both his and Nunez's ball progression abilities too. As far as I can tell, the only one of our other midfielders who would be in the upper half is Forsyth, but he has such a small sample size I'm not sure that would have stuck. Marcondes would come pretty close and Schwartau/Forson are near identical. Sorensen's defensive output isn't bad.

The recruitment team and its processes are much the same as they were before Knapper arrived. Obviously last summer's recruitment took a different shape but outside of that what we've seen this summer is pretty similar to any window under Webber. Knapper doesn't have any previous experience working in recruitment so I find it hard to believe he's come in and ripped everything up, especially when our recruitment has always been pretty good. The signings this summer definitely skewed to the young side, but we already had a decent side full of more senior performers. With parachute payments fully gone now we almost definitely need to be lowering the wage bill and finding players to sell on for profit. I'm sure someone can correct me but the post the other day about our financial situation which said we had somehow magically scraped through the PSR rules, another year means that we're going to have to reduce costs again. If that is the case it's better to spend on upside while we can, as that can help alleviate money problems down the line, instead of trying to plug gaps here and now. The club have been very careful in their wording, Thorup has seemed to only say that playoffs is the target, which seems fair and gives a reason to keep fans on board. The idea of a 2/3 year project comes from that interview Riddersholm did with the pinkun boys, I wonder if he perhaps let slip something that shouldn't have been said there as such. It wouldn't be sensible for the club to come out and say we're punting this year away, but just like Webber and Farke held the line after a 14th placed finish I would think internally the view is pretty similar now.

I think Crnac is clearly best suited to playing on the wing right now, his best moments come when he drops deep and can run with the ball. It's also going to be of benefit for him in the long term to play wide now instead of hiding him up front. I feel like I've said it a few times but he wasn't just the Idah replacement, we had someone lined up for that but when Rowe decided he was off we pivoted to spending more of our money to replace him. He was always signed to be a winger this year at least, in the future he may end up as a striker. The biggest issue for me is that we allowed Kamara to go, as if he was still here we would have had another option on the right and both him and Crnac could have done a job backing up Sargent (and Onel who played that role too). He obviously wanted to go but it wasn't in the club's interest in my view, even if he would have refused to sign a contract. When it comes to recruitment I tend to back the team we have pretty strongly, for years now they've turned up players from all over the world and it's the same people who have been here for years. That doesn't mean they'll always get it right but I think a lot of the failures had more to do with the coaching of the team than the player itself.