Jump to content

Beefy is a legend

Members
  • Content Count

    955
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Beefy is a legend

  1. It doesn't have to be quite so binary. It's a combination of things. - our overall budget which is meagre at PL level. - our recruitment strategy which prioritises signing young players in the hope they will develop and appreciate in value. We needed more 25 year old players like Dimi and Normann than 20 year olds like Sargent and Tzolis. - the individuals identified and signed, who've proved to be inadequate for the most part. There was also a serious lack of PL experience throughout our transfer business. This is the best league in the world. In relation to the latter, obviously Webber has to take significant responsibility. £20m on Tzolis and Sargent has been a disaster. But there is a bigger picture in that the strategy as a whole is not designed to give us the best chance to stay up in the here and now.
  2. Should be positive, especially as he didn't 'leave at the first opportunity'. He stayed and got us promoted when it seems fairly clear he wished to leave at the start of that season. Applaud before and after the game. During it, he's the enemy.
  3. I have a ticket available in lower barclay. Please private message me if interested. Cheers.
  4. BT is about the only thing I don't subscribe to. Any ideas on how to watch?
  5. It's all a little disappointing really. If you take The Athletic, they were genuinely doing something different. There is a depth of inside knowledge in some of Michael Bailey's articles that you simply don't get elsewhere. That makes it worth paying for. With the greatest of respect, because genuinely I like all of the Pinkun boys, Paddy, Connor and Dave, paying to read Paddy's Pointers doesn't really float my boat.
  6. The issue I have with it is that they aren't really creating any new, innovative content. They are just pay-walling existing content that was previously free. I won't be subscribing.
  7. The answer to how the recruitment could be spot on is, to be fair, 'With great difficulty'. However, it is clear that we haven't entirely recruited with the sole focus of survival in mind. Sargent and Tzolis have been signed with the future in mind. The plan being at some stage that they will be saleable assets worth more than we paid for them. Now, you can make a case as to why that is entirely understandable using our model. But, it hasn't given us the best chance to stay up in the here and now. To do that, we needed a few more players like Normann, Giannoulis and Rashica, in the 24-27 year age bracket, than playing Sargent, Idah, Tzolis as well as Omobamidele who are all very inexperienced in football in general, not just the PL. £10m doesn't buy you a lot these days in terms of PL quality, but it probably could have got us better than we've got. In that sense, I don't blame Webber entirely for the poor recruitment. But it is a combination of financial muscle lacking, as well as the club's transfer strategy overall, as well as the individual players identified and recruited not coming up to PL standard.
  8. There is another possibility. It is possible to compete under our model, but the recruitment has to be spot on. This season, the recruitment hasn't been spot on. It's been nowhere near.
  9. We will never know if Farke would have taken more or fewer points. Smith has had a much more favourable run of fixtures to start with than Farke had this season though. The results have been okay but no better. We were very lucky to beat Southampton (first half was, for me, the worst we've played all season except maybe Chelsea second half), maybe a little unlucky not to beat Wolves, and then have put in two poor away displays. Newcastle was mostly dreadful. I thought we did okay today but just lacked quality. Smith has had very few games though so it's unfair to draw any conclusions yet and he deserves plenty of time. The next 6 games look very difficult though, including the defeat today, so we'll see whether the criticism starts to come for Smith in due course when we, most likely have an Xmas period that yields very little. West Ham and Palace away both fill me with dread. Farke had a woeful PL record but he had a woeful PL squad. In my view the current squad is still sub-par. I place far more blame on the recruitment than I will Farke, and indeed Smith, if this campaign ends in relegation as it most likely will.
  10. I can't speak for Lakey, but I was incredibly protective of Farke given how far he had brought the club from when he came in. That forgave a multitude of sins as far as I was concerned and I was prepared to defend Webber and the board to the hilt in keeping him in post. When Farke was sacked, that kind of changed something for me. I don't have the same loyalty to Smith. I want him to succeed of course, but I'm going to call it like it is right now, even if that means criticising the club heavily, which I generally don't do because my natural inclination is to be positive and supportive. Because ultimately I see Farke as a fall guy. Where we are right now is down to the players not being good enough.
  11. We just have a group of players that aren't good enough. It's painfully clear to see. The recruitment in the summer has been poor. I see the reasons for this as follows: - Recruiting very young players because they may appreciate in value and become saleable assets at some stage. - Recruiting with limited finance. - Recruiting from foreign leagues where players will have no experience playing in the highest quality league in the world. - The identification of the players that have been eventually signed e.g Sargent, who looks woefully out of his depth technically.
  12. You do need two PL class keepers. I'm more concerned with the £25m spent on Tzolis, Sargent and PLM.
  13. They shouldn't have signed them. That's my point. This position we are in is not a coaching staff issue. Put Farke, Deano, Pep or whoever you like in charge. It's a recruitment issue which you can jointly attribute to limited finance, transfer strategy (going for very young players), and the risk of recruiting from abroad. What we have is, for the most part, not good enough. There are 4 players in our squad that I can say with genuine confidence are PL quality. Krul, Aarons, Pukki and Normann. Three of those were already here before the summer.
  14. He looks slightly better on the ball than McLean or Rupp, but not particularly physical for a big guy. He looks like someone you might sign just because he 6'1'' but then it turns out he can't win a header. Just feels like he's not particularly an upgrade on what we already had.
  15. I don't think the result today is particularly surprising, or important for how our season ends up. It's more the fact that we are just seeing before our eyes that most of the players we've signed simply aren't good enough. It doesn't really matter who you make the manager if the players aren't up to it. We've asked a bunch of 20 year olds from foreign leagues to come and do the job for us at the highest level, joining another bunch of 20 year old academy lads. It's simply asking too much for lads like Sargent and Tzolis to come here and make the difference. They aren't ready for it at this stage of their careers.
  16. The issue is this. We spent about £30m on three forward players that were supposed to make the difference for us. Sargent, Tzolis and Rashica. Sargent and Tzolis look nowhere near the standard required in terms of the combination of physical, mental and technical attributes needed, as well as being hugely short of experience. They have scope to improve in time, but in the here and now, they are not going to get the goals and assists that we need to stay up. Rashica is the most promising of the three, but after a third of the season has 0 goals and 1 assist. These are the players that Webber has hung his hat on. But the reality is that our 32 year old free transfer striker is the only person giving us a sliver of a chance of staying up. For whatever reason, and some of it is obviously financial, the summer transfer business wasn't good enough and, whilst we still have an outside chance to stay up, we clearly have one of the three worst squads in this division.
  17. Newcastle are in desperate trouble for me. They have to win at least 9 matches from here. By the time they get to January and sign and bed in players there will only be 16 or 17 games left. You can write off 4 or 5 of those given they are playing the top sides. It is a huge ask for them to stay up from here. They do have NCFC and Burnley I think in the next two games so they are absolutely crucial fixtures to give themselves any chance. They certainly need a couple of wins before they are able to bring in some recruits. As for NCFC, we are still favourites to go down. We still have one of the three weakest squads in this league. We aren't miles off the likes of Leeds and Southampton though and so if we have some luck and good management, then we have a hope. We showed a dramatic improvement against Wolves in terms of defensive shape and that does bode very well. Having said that we didn't look hugely creative, we were fairly reliant on Rashica to make something happen. If we don't beat Newcastle on Tuesday, which is not particularly likely, then with Spurs and Man Utd to follow we could easily be 6 or 7 points adrift of 17th again by the time we play Aston Villa. We are going to need to pull out a big win somewhere. Newcastle is an opportunity but it's also a game we could just as easily lose - we don't have anyone with the class of a Saint-Maximin in our squad. I also worry that if injuries do hit then we have some big problems in certain areas. An injury to Pukki and a long-term injury to Normann will hurt us. We have had almost our whole squad fit for this season and that may well not remain the case. So realistically it's still a huge ask but 7 points from 3 games has put us in the mix. And personally, that's what I expected from us this year. Not necessarily to stay up comfortably, but to at least be in the fight to stay up and not a mile away from 17th. Over the last few weeks we've shown that we are in the fight.
  18. Yeah Amazon Prime has it as well as the Crystal Palace away game at Xmas.
  19. They are already getting towards needing 2 points per game just to make the playoffs. Their defensive record this season has been shocking. So many points thrown away from winning positions. Their constant languishing in that division is a joy to behold!
  20. The issue that concerns me is that the vast majority of the time Krul was just smashing it long on restarts with McLean asked to go up and challenge the opposition centre-halves. I very much hope that was temporary measure for this game with lack of training time etc. Because carry on like that and it won't be very long at all before the critics come out. We were lucky to win yesterday. We were truly dreadful in the first half, probably the worst half I've seen all season. We did much better in the second half and managed to notch from a set piece but I felt both of our goals were keeper errors and Southampton should have been 4-1 up at half-time. Plenty of positives in the second half though and I think Rashica is gradually improving game by game. Both centre-halves produced some great blocks too. The transition away from Farkeball is going to be a bumpy one though and we are going to have play much, much better to continue this mini-run of good results.
  21. It's an inconvenient reality that in order to defend set pieces, especially at this level where you up against teams of giants, you actually need 4 or 5 players capable of winning a header. You stick Tzolis, Cantwell, Gilmour and Rashica along with Pukki, Max and Dimi in the team and you become sitting ducks on crosses, corners and free kicks.
  22. I loved that DPC shirt. I swapped mine with a Crewe fan when we invaded the pitch after the final game of the season, where Iwan scored that absolute wonder goal in his last game. The Crewe fan was half my size so his shirt didn't even fit me!
  23. I don't really see Max going in January to fund a big transfer spend. It's not really how we operate. We do our recruitment in the summer. 1 or 2 additions might happen but I wouldn't expect 4 or 5.
  24. 7 would be absolutely fantastic. But given Spurs (a) we will be huge odds against, I should think 4 or 5 points would be a good effort. I'd take winning 2 and losing 2 right now because 11pts from 15 games will put us firmly back in the mix. Winning a game in this league is so difficult though when you have one of the weakest squads. Southampton is probably our best chance of a win out of the 4, so I'm hoping for a bouncing atmosphere and the players getting a lift mentally.
  25. Excellent post IMHO, I basically never criticise the club but this last week has felt so far removed from the ethos of the last 4 years that it is impossible for me to defend it. Letting an excellent manager (relative to what NCFC are capable of attracting) go with very little chance of replacing him with better is a terrible mistake.
×
×
  • Create New...