Barham Blitz

C'mon Dimi - get it over. I've been practising my jumping for the new formation ...

Completely agree with your observations in general, and the logical assumption would see him as part of that midfield 3 in a McGinn style role but just a thought based on the admittedly patchy evidence of the Nunez YouTube highlights reel ... As a relatively slight 5'8" tricky player with good feet, an eye for a goal and more importantly an eye for a slipped pass, combined with a good engine a bit of pace and excellent ball retention there appear (dare I say it) to be a few similarities with a former player of ours currently playing his trade in Birmingham. Whilst it appears that he has mainly played centrally he has also played wider and even at full back. The highlights (admittedly almost by definition) show him receiving the ball higher up the pitch - generally in a wider 3/4 type position -and cutting in or running beyond a defence with a give and go. I don't think it would be too much of a stretch for him to offer a more athletic (than Cantwell or Dowell) Emi style option in a 4-2-3-1 as well.

Long-time lurker. Seems to me that as various posters have suggested, Webber needed to top up the transfer kitty through the sale of an asset and may well have preferred that asset to be Aarons but in combination with his desire to move on and the fact that the only sizeable bids received were for him, that asset turned out to be Buendia. The interesting element for me then focuses on the change in formation and personnel following the sale. We didn’t look to replace Buendia like for like (if that was even possible) – the signings of Rashica and Tzolis in particular up top and Normann, PLM and Gilmour in midfield looked to be geared absolutely towards a counter-attacking 4-3-3 with the midfield trio looking to provide longer vertical passes in a faster transition from an essentially defensive standpoint to more traditional wide players. I vaguely remember an Athletic article on Normann highlighting his use of longer channel passing for example, and I wonder if the Sargent signing was a recognition that Pukki might not thrive in such a set up, but that Hugill wouldn’t be mobile enough. It obviously didn’t work – Parma has articulated the shortcomings of traditional wingers if you don’t have the ball in the Premiership - but there is a [sort of] logic there. The fact that Cantwell disappeared, Sargent demonstrated that he lacked a striker’s instinct, and Rashica and Tzolis had nothing like the expected effect would certainly not have helped the change. Similarly Gilmour and Normann’s inability to find them regularly and the fact that even as a relatively low central block in midfield they were all questionable defensively in comparison to Skipp also undermines the approach. So the question for me would be a chicken and egg one of whether the move to a counter-attacking but more direct 4-3-3 was a result of the sale of Buendia and the lack of a direct replacement, or whether he was viewed as potentially expendable given a change in formation that was viewed as more likely to keep us up than the Farkeball 4-2-3-1 (which was also always going to suffer from the lack of an available alternative to Skipp and our demonstrable dependence on Buendia in the Championship formation.) If the latter, the sale of Buendia and the subsequent “justification” that he had forced a move would be necessary to finance the changes that perhaps Webber thought needed to be made anyway – hence Farke suggesting that we [Webber] had chosen to sell. Given Farke’s comments about his preferred targets and the general tactical approach during his tenure, I’m not sure that the decision was entirely mutual mind …