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Baldyboy

Defending Alex Neil

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[quote user="lake district canary"]The first thing people would be saying if we kept losing games and AN was picking a settled team, would be "change it" because we are losing!  You can''t have it both ways. [/quote]
Yes, well said.
If we change the team up for West Ham then the cry will be "he keeps chopping and changing".
If we name the same team against West Ham then it will be "Martin?  FFS, when will he learn?"
It''s easy to be on the bandwagon when things are going well, but when the team goes on a bad run, this is when supporters show their true colours.  Yellow is quite fitting for some.

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Someone should get in touch with Trading Standards regarding Mulumbo calling himself a pro footballer

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[quote user="daly"]Someone should get in touch with Trading Standards regarding Mulumbo calling himself a pro footballer[/quote]
Wasn''t he that detective with the glass eye?

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[quote user="Kingston Yellow"]Purple - I don''t agree the net spend misleading. I think it''s contextual. I simply cannot begin to understand what went on in the summer transfer window.

Out of interest (and I''m not picking another argument) how did you arrive at £4m - £6m?[/quote]Misleading is the appropriate word. As to my figure, bearing in mind these calculations can only be based on headlines and are necessarily crude:We sold Johnson for £6m. We paid perhaps £7.5m for Brady and around £3m for Dorrans, and I assume we paid West Ham and Dynamo Kiev each some kind of loan fee for Jarvis and Mbokani respectively, just as St-Etienne (the poor sods) handed over £1.25m for having the dubious benefit of van Wolfswinkel for a season.What size those loan fees might be I have no idea but if we paid Dynamo Kiev roughly what St-Etienne coughed up then a net spend of at least £6m looks resonable. And bear in mind that, as the accounts state, our summer transfers in could entail extra payments by us of £9.4m, depending on whether various add-on clauses are fulfilled.I do not find what happened in the summer that difficult to understand, which is not to say I think it all went swimmingly. We tried to spend a record amojnt £9m or so?) on a central defender, but failed. Perhaps we went for targets who were out of reach? An mistake, whatever the reason. And according to Bethnal (the only poster here whose inside information I take on trust) we woud have signed Dwight Gayle if Palace had not pulled out  (presumably Wickham getting injured) at the very last moment. The money was made available, but there may have been strategic errors.

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[quote user="Jan Van Borsburg"][quote user="daly"]Someone should get in touch with Trading Standards regarding Mulumbo calling himself a pro footballer[/quote]
Wasn''t he that detective with the glass eye?
[/quote]

At least Columbo solved the problem AN and Frankie goes to Hamilton do not have a clue

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PurpleCanary wrote the following post at 08/02/2016 4:14 PM:The net spend figure (perhaps somewhere between £4m and £6m) is misleading for two reasons. Three of the major signings (all pretty much welcomed here at the time) were Mulumbu, who was a free agent, and Jarvis and Mbokani, whom we acquired on loan, and so none of those cost a proper transfer fee. Secondly, having plainly decided (rightly or wrongly) we had no need of Johnson, we managed to get £6m for him very late on.

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Agree with Kingston Yellow; still don''t understand why the net spend is misleading. We simply didn''t spend enough, especially when we had sold a key player in BJ. We reinvested that into Brady but had spent barely anything on other players in the summer.

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What''s a little depressing is that it isn''t rocket science to work out the destabilising effects of an ever changing line up. I still get a game in each week and even at my hobby-level it is remarkable how playing with different people creates a completely different experience and sometimes quite unexpectedly. Heaven knows how tough it must be at Prem level when the margins are so fine and the opposition so skilled at exploiting any weakness. Obviously sometimes you must change things, but you really do need a solid stable core and in my view it should be the exception not the norm.

And then, playing players out of position? I am not sure it ever really works. Sure sometimes they change for good as Chris Sutton did, but once he became a centre forward he stayed a centre forward.

And then what about those who have been frozen out? Why have some such as Laffs never really got a proper run, he comes in for a few minutes here and there and is on a hiding to nothing. Must be pretty demoralising.

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[quote user="mrs miggins"]PurpleCanary wrote the following post at 08/02/2016 4:14 PM:The net spend figure (perhaps somewhere between £4m and £6m) is misleading for two reasons. Three of the major signings (all pretty much welcomed here at the time) were Mulumbu, who was a free agent, and Jarvis and Mbokani, whom we acquired on loan, and so none of those cost a proper transfer fee. Secondly, having plainly decided (rightly or wrongly) we had no need of Johnson, we managed to get £6m for him very late on.

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Agree with Kingston Yellow; still don''t understand why the net spend is misleading. We simply didn''t spend enough, especially when we had sold a key player in BJ. We reinvested that into Brady but had spent barely anything on other players in the summer.[/quote]It is misleading because it doesn''t give you a true sense of the quality of player we signed in the summer. If we had bought Mbokani outright I imagine it would have cost us somewhere between £8m and £10m. By getting him on loan we saved a vast amount of money. The same argument applied to Jarvis, albeit with a much lower saving. And acquiring a 29-year-old midfielder who had played 157 times in the Premier League for nothing was also good business.What matters is not how much you spend but the quality of player signed. The logic of your argument is that you would have been happier if we had paid £5m or £6m each for three players even though they weren''t as good as those we acquired for next to nothing. I don''t think there is too much doubt it was only because we filled three important squad positions so comparitively cheaply that we had the money left over to offer Napoli around £9m (ie a club record) for Koulibaly. Of course that fell through, but if we had already needlessly wasted many millions on transfers fees when we didn''t have to there would have been no deal to fail.

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I love that people on this board can''t see the irony in clamouring for Nigel Pearson - a man who ultimately succeeded in the Premier League at Leicester because his board (eventually) stood by him rather than firing him when things got tough.

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I think the Lafferty thing is quite straightforward, AN considers him fourth choice and its as simple as that. He knows Lafferty from Scottish football and knows what he is about, he didn''t sign him at the end of the day so its his perogative to not pick him.

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I accept he didn''t sign him but he hasn''t been moved on and hardly plays. But he was brim full of confidence when scoring for Ni. Why not tap into that? And why sign Andrew and not play him much either? Its like Hughton and Becchio.

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PurpleCanary wrote the following post at 09/02/2016 9:17 PM:It is misleading because it doesn''t give you a true sense of the quality of player we signed in the summer. If we had bought Mbokani outright I imagine it would have cost us somewhere between £8m and £10m. By getting him on loan we saved a vast amount of money. The same argument applied to Jarvis, albeit with a much lower saving. And acquiring a 29-year-old midfielder who had played 157 times in the Premier League for nothing was also good business.

What matters is not how much you spend but the quality of player signed. The logic of your argument is that you would have been happier if we had paid £5m or £6m each for three players even though they weren''t as good as those we acquired for next to nothing.

I don''t think there is too much doubt it was only because we filled three important squad positions so comparitively cheaply that we had the money left over to offer Napoli around £9m (ie a club record) for Koulibaly. Of course that fell through, but if we had already needlessly wasted many millions on transfers fees when we didn''t have to there would have been no deal to fail.

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As you say, by loaning Mbokani in we saved a lot of money on the transfer fee, but we didn''t spend the money that we ''saved'' from and thats the point of the debate. The logic of my argument isn''t that I would be happier if we had paid £6m for Gayle for example because personally I think the signings AN has made have been good (except Andreu last season), my argument is that every team has 3 loan slots to fill (I think) and we did that well imo, but the actual permanent signings that a club like us should be making didn''t happen. We signed Brady for £7m and looked to be a decent signing, we paid £3m for Dozza who we knew would be a squad filler - the same as the free agent Mulumbu; a seemingly decent free defensive mid.

If we had bought Mbokani for £8m and loaned in someone like Dozza from west brom, we''d still be saying the same thing; we didn''t spend enough.

As you say, money doesn''t equal quality - just look at QPR, but at least they gave it a go whereas we had money sitting there whilst the window slowly shut.

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[quote user="mrs miggins"]PurpleCanary wrote the following post at 09/02/2016 9:17 PM:It is misleading because it doesn''t give you a true sense of the quality of player we signed in the summer. If we had bought Mbokani outright I imagine it would have cost us somewhere between £8m and £10m. By getting him on loan we saved a vast amount of money. The same argument applied to Jarvis, albeit with a much lower saving. And acquiring a 29-year-old midfielder who had played 157 times in the Premier League for nothing was also good business.

What matters is not how much you spend but the quality of player signed. The logic of your argument is that you would have been happier if we had paid £5m or £6m each for three players even though they weren''t as good as those we acquired for next to nothing.

I don''t think there is too much doubt it was only because we filled three important squad positions so comparitively cheaply that we had the money left over to offer Napoli around £9m (ie a club record) for Koulibaly. Of course that fell through, but if we had already needlessly wasted many millions on transfers fees when we didn''t have to there would have been no deal to fail.

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As you say, by loaning Mbokani in we saved a lot of money on the transfer fee, but we didn''t spend the money that we ''saved'' from and thats the point of the debate. The logic of my argument isn''t that I would be happier if we had paid £6m for Gayle for example because personally I think the signings AN has made have been good (except Andreu last season), my argument is that every team has 3 loan slots to fill (I think) and we did that well imo, but the actual permanent signings that a club like us should be making didn''t happen. We signed Brady for £7m and looked to be a decent signing, we paid £3m for Dozza who we knew would be a squad filler - the same as the free agent Mulumbu; a seemingly decent free defensive mid.

If we had bought Mbokani for £8m and loaned in someone like Dozza from west brom, we''d still be saying the same thing; we didn''t spend enough.

As you say, money doesn''t equal quality - just look at QPR, but at least they gave it a go whereas we had money sitting there whilst the window slowly shut.[/quote]The point I was answering was this:The club let him down in the summer with almost no net spend.In other words using the net spend figure as a stick with which to beat the club by pretending that in this case it was an accurate reflection of the quality of player we brought in, when it wasn''t.  The pure logic of using a net spend figure without putting it in context is that it would have been better to throw away countless millions signing Ibrahimovic, Messi and Ronaldo when we could have got them much cheaper on loan or on free transfers. A kind of financial machismo.A very rough transfer figure for the players we signed in the summer would be £7m or so for Brady, £3m or a bit more for Dorrans, £9m for Mbokani, £5m or £6m for Mulumbu and £3.5m for Jarvis. That comes to close to £30m. Take away £6m for Johnson and the net spend figure is well over £20m. Which is why I have said all along using the a spend figure of £3m (which is wrong anyway) is so misleading.Of course the mistake was not spending the money we had first saved, but to blame the club, as several have, for having been cute enough to save the money to give us the chance to fail to spend it is looking-glass logic.

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its not the quality of the player its the quality of the manager and coaching letting us down

all the players are playing with out confidence within themselves

most of our players if not all are out of form you seen many players who play above their quality / ability through the years do to grit and determination playing in a system that suits them

a prime example is if we signed harry kane quality he would not score in this team set up

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I see a good number of posts attributing our current precarious position to the lack of quality signings in the summer, but I struggle to reconcile this with the fact that this apparently under-strength pool of players were sitting fairly comfortably outside the relegation zone at the halfway point in the season, above other teams who presumably did get all their targets in before the window shut (because, of course, it''s only Norwich who ever fail to do so). It''s since we did get some new players in that things have gone a little wonky.

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PurpleCanary wrote the following post at 10/02/2016 8:46 AM:The point I was answering was this:

The club let him down in the summer with almost no net spend.

In other words using the net spend figure as a stick with which to beat the club by pretending that in this case it was an accurate reflection of the quality of player we brought in, when it wasn''t. The pure logic of using a net spend figure without putting it in context is that it would have been better to throw away countless millions signing Ibrahimovic, Messi and Ronaldo when we could have got them much cheaper on loan or on free transfers. A kind of financial machismo.

A very rough transfer figure for the players we signed in the summer would be £7m or so for Brady, £3m or a bit more for Dorrans, £9m for Mbokani, £5m or £6m for Mulumbu and £3.5m for Jarvis. That comes to close to £30m. Take away £6m for Johnson and the net spend figure is well over £20m. Which is why I have said all along using the a spend figure of £3m (which is wrong anyway) is so misleading.

Of course the mistake was not spending the money we had first saved, but to blame the club, as several have, for having been cute enough to save the money to give us the chance to fail to spend it is looking-glass logic.

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I see what you mean, to use it as a stick to beat the club without contextualising it is wrong, however as city fans we know the context that it is in; we knew the situation at the end of the summer window and we know it now, the situation hasn''t changed.

Say we had a net spend of the £35m from the players we bought (e.g imagine if we had bought Dorrans for £8m), the complaints from fans wouldn''t be that we didn''t spend enough, the complaints would be that we spent too much on average players; the context has therefore changed.

I understand your point that with the players we got in we could''ve spent a lot by overpaying, but the fact is that we didn''t. As you say we tried to get Koulibaly who would''ve cost around £10m, but we didn''t get him. We said the same thing then and we''re saying the same thing now.

Context is everything and as city fans we know the context and that''s why one of the reasons we haven''t done well enough so far is because of the net spend and spending in general. So although I would say you''re right in answering the statement; ''The club let him down in the summer with almost no net spend,'' when put in context the statement is correct.

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It''s a total bin fest on here at the moment with people coming onto defend Neil which most sane fans are now realising is clearly the wrong thing to do

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