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a1canary

Disagree that we got last summer window "horribly wrong"

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I like a lot of what DM has said and to me at least, he has been this club''s Messiah, not that outer one.

I just don''t agree that our summer transfer activity so bad. With the benefit of hindsight obviously we might not have gone in for RvW but most commentators thought we had a very active and fruitful summer. I would also have bought in another CB which was much debated on here about whether it was neccessary. Given the dodgy form of Bassong, i think most would have agreed we needed someone else. You might also question Elmander''s signing.

But the truth be told, most of us including me believe we had enought to stay up if the manager had worked out how to get the best out of his players and worked out our strongest set up. He never did that. Don''t forget the squad we had the first season we stayed up. We strengthened well after that and made some strong additions last summer like Redmond and Olsson and Hooper who in my view was woefully underused this season.

There''s no way i would blame our relegation on last summer''s transfer window. If that''s what McN is saying. He hasn''t said that outright but he''s certainly indicating it was a major factor. That and the manager having too many non-football distractions.

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It all depends what McNally means by "horribly wrong"?

I guess he was referring to RVW, possibly not getting in a creative attacking midfielder, the lack of quality in defence?

all speculation... I am guessing but I think that a couple of signings we made were perhaps worse players than cheaper options we over looked or passed on?

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How can the last summer window not be seen as a big part of the problem?

 

We signed strikers who don''t seem fit in. Don''t seem cut out to play on their own upfront and don''t seem to be able to play together.

 

And we also didn''t give ourselves strength in depth - which always looked a concern to me going into the season. Injuries to Howson, Tettey, Fer and Turner were really damaging as there''s not much in the way of quality replacements in the squad.

 

But even worse was the failure to boost our attacking threat in the January window. It was obvious we had made the wrong signings, obvious we were going to struggle but we just didn''t get anyone.

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The hindsight bit is important.I seem to remember everyone being happy with the strikers we bought, I don''t think anyone could have predicted how it would have turned out.

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Summer 2013 didn''t go horribly wrong.  January did.  Only signing 2 loan players was pretty poor, especially when Jonas had barley played all season.  Yobo done a job most of the time in the games he played.

 

We should''ve strengthend more in January In more opinion.

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I agree that the transfer activity did not go horribly wrong;   pre season we were praised for the quality of signings.    The only words of caution were that we had not strengthed the squad enough - an additional cb was targeted and not signed and we had not bought the attacking link man midfielder we were also seeking.    

 

 

If by horribly wrong he means over focusing on Adewiereld (sp?) and Quag while not having or keeping warm a plan b - then yes it went wrong,  ditto if they expected all the new signings to have a full fully productive season - new signings rarely work like that.   Its not down to the number of changes either;  we have changed 10+ players for each of the last 5 seasons.

 

 

What really went horribly wrong was not ensuring we had a plan on how to make the new signings work,  no plan B and two managers who decided that problem of not scoring goals would be solved by constantly changing a consistent performing back 4 and alternating the strikers while leaving the mis passing non tackling non tracking midfield alone.   

 

We did not get relegated due to last two transfer windows but because the player did not perform as a team and the managers made repeated mistakes.   We dropped c10 points from games we have got none from - for that the players are to blame for repeated individual errors.

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That''s a very good point Zipper - about the signings that didn''t come off as opposed to those that did. And about which we know less but, he could well be alluding to.

Especially Alderweild - when these supposed approaches came to nought, it''s true that we didn''t seem to have a fall back plan. But then we''d be accused of settling for second best! He may event have felt it was a mistake to approach them, although i wouldn''t say that neccessarily.

I do find it interesting also that DM singles out the Summer window rather than the winter window. Which would seem to suggest he is alluding to something that happened in the summer and possibly because it then affected the budget/spend for the winter.

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[quote user="a1canary"] I do find it interesting also that DM singles out the Summer window rather than the winter window. Which would seem to suggest he is alluding to something that happened in the summer and possibly because it then affected the budget/spend for the winter.[/quote]

 

spending 9 million quid on a pub player....

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[quote user="jed exodous"]

Summer 2013 didn''t go horribly wrong.  January did.  Only signing 2 loan players was pretty poor, especially when Jonas had barley played all season.  Yobo done a job most of the time in the games he played.

 

We should''ve strengthend more in January In more opinion.

[/quote]McNally has said more than a few times, that January is a horrible time to do business, and that you should only really be taking cover, as opposed to actually signing anyone.He did the business in the previous summer re strikers, and when it became obvious it wasn''t working, we weren''t in a position to buy any more.Like I said, hindsight.

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[quote user="jas the barclay king"]

[quote user="a1canary"] I do find it interesting also that DM singles out the Summer window rather than the winter window. Which would seem to suggest he is alluding to something that happened in the summer and possibly because it then affected the budget/spend for the winter.[/quote]

 

spending 9 million quid on a pub player....

[/quote]

Hooper was more like £5m tbf.

 

We seem to have paid £9m for a feather. ;-)

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[quote user="jas the barclay king"]

[quote user="a1canary"] I do find it interesting also that DM singles out the Summer window rather than the winter window. Which would seem to suggest he is alluding to something that happened in the summer and possibly because it then affected the budget/spend for the winter.[/quote]

 

spending 9 million quid on a pub player....

[/quote]Again, hindsight.Look back at articles at the time, pretty much everyone thought we had the bargain of the season on our hands.

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Well there was that Bleacher report article someone linked to on here.  It predicted RVW would struggle in the Prem after his debut game, despite the fact that he''d scored.

 

Most of us were enthusiastic about RVW when he signed but I suspect this was on the basis that he was coming from Sporting Lisbon and had scored plenty of goals for them, so given that CH and our board thought he was worth £8.5m, we felt he must be a quality player. 

 

With hindsight I don''t think he was a bad player or overpriced, but simply not the right sort of player for our team and the way Hughton had us playing.

 

Unfortunately he was our key signing and the same problem, to a lesser extent, applies to our signing of Hooper.  And I think it is this problem which was the most important part of us getting relegated, so I would agree that this aspect of our signings did go horribly wrong last summer.

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We made the right type of signings imo - spent the right sums of money, got the right positions covered (all perhaps apart from am upgrade on a Hoolahan type player). Unfortunately, we didn''t pick the right players for those right types of transfers.

The hindsight argument isn''t really a good defence Morty. That''s what scouts are for - to try and identify players who will fit in. Of course you don''t expect them to be one hundred percent right all of the time and some players will flop. But to get the two big strikers so horrendously wrong reflects very badly on them. Most of the other signings haven''t been disastrous - Fer has been underwhelming without being completely useless and Redmond and Elmander have done reasonable jobs without really showing enough to be considered huge successes. Olsson is probably the big tick for the scouting team (and arguably Yobo in on loan as well).

But I''m afraid they got our two biggest signings - both in terms of money spent and in terms of "get this right and we stay up, wrong and we go down" - horribly wrong.

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[quote user="Aggy"]We made the right type of signings imo - spent the right sums of money, got the right positions covered (all perhaps apart from am upgrade on a Hoolahan type player). Unfortunately, we didn''t pick the right players for those right types of transfers.

The hindsight argument isn''t really a good defence Morty. That''s what scouts are for - to try and identify players who will fit in. Of course you don''t expect them to be one hundred percent right all of the time and some players will flop. But to get the two big strikers so horrendously wrong reflects very badly on them. Most of the other signings haven''t been disastrous - Fer has been underwhelming without being completely useless and Redmond and Elmander have done reasonable jobs without really showing enough to be considered huge successes. Olsson is probably the big tick for the scouting team (and arguably Yobo in on loan as well).

But I''m afraid they got our two biggest signings - both in terms of money spent and in terms of "get this right and we stay up, wrong and we go down" - horribly wrong.[/quote]Yes it is. How many people criticised our signings at the time, or said they would flop, and we would be relegated?Take a look at Spurs if you need other examples of it not quite working out.Has Hooper been a complete flop, or has he returned what was reasonably expected of him?Really, all said and done, you get what you pay for, and people got a bit carried away with Ricky''s pricetag.

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If we had managed to sign the three continentals we wanted, it could have been a different season, and if we had not hung on with Hughton''s near obsession that Hooper was a world beater, it could have been different.

There were one or two players in the Premiership who moved to other Prem clubs. If we had pursued them early and well, perhaps....

We don''t know what was said at discussions between manager and CEO last summer, and McN is not giving anything away, but clearly he feels enough to have apologised.

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McNally is making the comments with hindsight, but as we all know football is a results based industry so what he is saying is correct. The signings did turn out to be poor. Whether this was because they are good players played wrong, or not very good players is a bit academic.

 

I''m afraid I cant see many of those players getting into another prem team , with perhaps the exception being Fer who next to the right player I still think could be effective. I dont see him as a holding or defensive midfield player, but then again what do I know?

 

But it''s the strikers isnt it? If you include Holt , we managed to turn 4 players that had scored at one level or another into players that couldn''t. Chuck Elmander (not sure if he is/was a striker) into the pot and it gets worse. I still fail to see how they could have been so useless, without a little help from the coaching staff?  

 

RVW needs a special mention only because of the size of the transfer fee. I dont follow European football closely, nor play soccer manager so I had never heard of him. I assumed he was good by what people said, but even standing beside him at the pre season dinner I was amazed at his build. My assumption that he would have blinding pace also turned out not to be the case. I think there was a bit of Emporers New Clothes in that deal somewhere.

 

The loan signings in January were not better than cover for what we alrady had, I think Jonas was bizarre in the extreme.

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Obviously everything McNally said about getting last summer "horribly wrong" is said in hindsight, as at the time he thought, as did Hughton, that it was good business, otherwise. We would never have bought them.

As for us fans, and our view, how many of us had ever seen van wolfswinkle ever play? I hadn''t. I had just read he had scored shed loads of goals for sporting Lisbon and assumed he would be quality. Little did I realise he was small and without exceptional pace. Basically he was never going to work in hughton''s ultra defensive (and abominable 4-2-3-1) formation receiving the ball on the half way line versus two six foot plus defenders completely isolated.

Next hooper. I had seen hooper play for Celtic v juventus in the champions league, as a lone frontman. Those performances alone would''ve been enough to convince anyone that hooper wasn''t good enough to play up front on his own in the he premiership (juventus being on a par quality wise with the top 10 in the premiership in my opinion). Hooper never looked like scoring, and let''s face it, the difference in quality between Celtic and juventus is on a par with us and most of the upper half of the premiership. Also hooper doesn''t have great pace to stretch defences or get in behind them.

All in all, we spent close to £15 million on two strikers who weren''t up to premier league football last summer. Utter utter waste. And the fact neither had pace should throw open questions of hughton''s judgement (beyond all the other short comings he demonstrated).

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Hindsight argument is a little bit ''straw man'' imo.

Fans could see we had problems before Xmas. And nothing was done. It was more of the case. Not enough people on the board had a pair to do something about it at that time.

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A number of the signings WERE horribly wrong, but not because of price or lack of ability, but simply that they were always going to be square pegs in round holes in Hughton''s preferred style of play and formation.At Newcastle he had Carroll as a target man, at Brum it was Zigic, but instead of signing a similar style of player to either of them he instead went for a pair of goal poachers, neither of whom have the technical setup and physicality to play the hold up role to anywhere near the required level.We brought in a real box-to-box midfielder in Fer who also possesses strong attacking instincts and forced him to spend most of his time covering the likes of Johnson and being horribly restricted both in his role and where he was to pass to.We focused WAY too much of our play via Snoddy, and even when our wingers had the ball they consistently failed to provide the sort of supply that our strikers needed to thrive on.There was a defensive mindset and approach from day one, and it affected ALL of our strikers from Holt onwards, not to mention put a lot of additional pressure on our defensive and midfield in the process.Hughton marginalised the likes of Hoolahan, Fox, Becchio and Surman, all the while giving games to players such as Kamara, Jackson and Elmander who frankly just weren''t good enough for this level.Apart from Elmander and Nash (who''s done nothing wrong) we signed players who I genuinely feel are better than the people they were replacing from an ability perspective, but then has a management team that shockingly mis-managed those players, drained the life and soul out of our play, destroyed a huge amount of self-confidence and ultimately got us relegated.Do the players have to take some of the responsiblity - of course they do, but even some of the top players in the league would have struggled to perform in our setup, never mind new players coming in from other leagues etc...

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[quote user="Private Frazer"]Hindsight argument is a little bit ''straw man'' imo.

Fans could see we had problems before Xmas. And nothing was done. It was more of the case. Not enough people on the board had a pair to do something about it at that time.[/quote]Do we need to get into the sacking your manager v not sacking your manager circular debate yet again?It worked for some clubs, it didn''t for others. We will have no way of knowing how it would have worked out. You have an opinion on how it may have done, but its only an opinion.

So hindsight is actually very relevant.

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We were happy with the strikers because we all assumed that it heralded a change in playing style to accommodate them.

I for one still can''t quite believe that Hughton and his crack team of coaches didn''t work out what type of striker they had actually purchased.

All they had to do was look on You Tube at how RVW and Hooper scored all those goals, but apparently that was beyond them.

We certainly bought the wrong players for the system they continued playing so in that sense the summer signings were completely to blame.

Equally, what''s the point in the pacey, overlapping Olsson when he''s not allowed over the halfway line?

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I''m not interested in a sacking debate. It''s my opinion that saying we got the summer wrong is a bit of a straw man when we had the winter window to do something about it.

If they knew the summer was wrong. Why they didn''t do anything in the winter is the question.

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[quote user="Private Frazer"]I''m not interested in a sacking debate. It''s my opinion that saying we got the summer wrong is a bit of a straw man when we had the winter window to do something about it.

If they knew the summer was wrong. Why they didn''t do anything in the winter is the question.[/quote]Because buying in January should be avoided where possible. There isn''t usually much available, and what is, is horribly over priced.And McNally stated that they came extremely close to signing the elusive number 10.Bearing in mind the 25 man squad, what would you have done then, just bought another striker? Do you know a special place where we could have got (perhaps on loan) someone who could have scored us ten goals and kept us up? What if, all of a sudden Ricky had found his shooting boots? (Theres that hindsight thing again)No, it isn''t all about hindsight, but if you actually analyse how it was handled, the board pretty much did their best, given all the variables.

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And frankly the bit about the board getting things wrong, and how they should have listened to some of the fans, is more about drawing a line under the whole thing and moving on, and heading off months of "We told you so", rather than beating themselves up.

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How can we possibly know if we got the summer transfer window "horribly wrong", none of us can do anything more than speculate what we were trying to do or who we were after?

Did we give Quag to much time or did we not push the boat out as much as we should have done? How many of our top targets did we miss out on? Were we after a beast of a centre forward and centre half but ended up going with Elmander and what we already had at the back?

So without knowing what we were trying to get in, we can''t judge how wrong we got it. I believe what McNally says, and if he says we got it wrong then that''s good enough for me.

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Morty - "how many people criticised our signings at the time" is again missing the point of my previous post.

Like I said, the type of signing we made and the prices paid/ambition shown were good. But fans aren''t professional scouts. We don''t go and watch potential signings in live matches and training sessions. We don''t speak to other "inside sources" within the game who may have played with them or coached them and find out what sort of personality or drive they have. We see a player''s stats and that''s about it.

The scouts'' job is surely to see whether those stats can convert into on field performances for a certain club who play in a certain way, with a certain type of player required, in a certain division. Otherwise anyone can watch a few youtube clips and highlight programmes and decide how good the player''s technical ability is.

Also, I think a lot of fans saw the signings we made and thought we would play differently, in order to suit the styles of those players. We didn''t, we pretty much stuck to Houghton''s usual tactics and he didn''t seem to know how to get the best out of any of the new signings. So essentially, we signed a lot of players who looked good on paper without any real plan or direction as regards where and how those players fitted in to the style of football we were going to play. That is a disastrous transfer policy. Surely we needed to know how the manager wanted to play and go out and find players who would do us a job. We didn''t do that.

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[quote user="Aggy"]Morty - "how many people criticised our signings at the time" is again missing the point of my previous post.

Like I said, the type of signing we made and the prices paid/ambition shown were good. But fans aren''t professional scouts. We don''t go and watch potential signings in live matches and training sessions. We don''t speak to other "inside sources" within the game who may have played with them or coached them and find out what sort of personality or drive they have. We see a player''s stats and that''s about it.

The scouts'' job is surely to see whether those stats can convert into on field performances for a certain club who play in a certain way, with a certain type of player required, in a certain division. Otherwise anyone can watch a few youtube clips and highlight programmes and decide how good the player''s technical ability is.

Also, I think a lot of fans saw the signings we made and thought we would play differently, in order to suit the styles of those players. We didn''t, we pretty much stuck to Houghton''s usual tactics and he didn''t seem to know how to get the best out of any of the new signings. So essentially, we signed a lot of players who looked good on paper without any real plan or direction as regards where and how those players fitted in to the style of football we were going to play. That is a disastrous transfer policy. Surely we needed to know how the manager wanted to play and go out and find players who would do us a job. We didn''t do that.[/quote]Good points here.Everyone was horribly disappointed by the RVW purchase, but, even making allowances for the manager''s preferred style of play, it can''t just be co-incidence that ALL our strikers went backwards this season. To be fair Hughton couldn''t have foreseen just how poor RVW would be, but he must take the main blame for this season''s fiasco as all the failures were his purchases.There was no '' joined -up '' planning in recognizing the type of player required and we therefore ended up with square pegs in round holes.

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