With only the exception of Malone (and that's no disrespect ) to him, all the players that we've signed could easily play in the Premier League,
That means that if promotion was to happen then there wouldn't be a need for a massive squad overhaul to happen next season,
Burnley played Chelsea last weekend and I looked at their starting eleven and thought blimey only 3 of those players would get in to our side (Gray, Vokes and Deffour) and one of those (Deffour) is open to debate,
Shame we didn't get a second striker , and the more I see of Dwight Gayle the more I think he would have been perfect for us, and at £10 million he looks a bargain compared to others,
I hope now that come Jan 1st were either in the top 6 or if not certainly within 3 or 4 points of them and if we are I hope somebody has the balls to say "f**k FFP" we're going to have a real go for it now and let's bring the players in to make it happen"
The Championship is going to be fascinating this season and outside of Newcastle and possibly Villa we've got as good a chance as anybody
COYSW
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I wouldn't say clever - just sensible. It;s rather like what Tigana did. The problem with the last two "rebuildings" is precisely that the players weren't capable of a higher league.
by that logic, the players that we came down with originally (although Magath cleared a few out) should've been able to play in the championship easily. That as we all know, ended up not being the case.
Quote from: Statto on September 01, 2016, 04:04:47 PM
Sorry you must be joking. If we go up it's another overhaul. Same for any club in this division
Except of course newly promoted Hull City and Burnley
When you see middle of the table sides in the Prem signing players hardly anyone has heard of for sums in excess of £20 mil it frightens me to death.
Quote from: Statto on September 01, 2016, 06:16:24 PM
Quote from: General on September 01, 2016, 05:33:19 PM
by that logic, the players that we came down with originally (although Magath cleared a few out) should've been able to play in the championship easily. That as we all know, ended up not being the case.
We don't know that. We've no idea how they'd have done. They were all offloaded because we couldn't afford them, and we played with the u18s instead.
We kept quite a few, and that team would likely not have gotten promoted and obviously we needed an overhaul.
I think we've been pretty close to as clever as we could have been given the funds made available. Best transfer window in probably 6-8 years. I think you need to give credit to stats boy, but if SJ had any input we might have done even better.
With Tigana remember he upgraded the team even back then with £30m worth of transfers in August.
If you get promotion you then need to bring in 5/6 starters. The jump in quality is just too much not to.
Of the regular starting 11 that came down with us, only Parker played regularly in the Championship. The rest went.
Quote from: MJG on September 01, 2016, 07:55:04 PM
With Tigana remember he upgraded the team even back then with £30m worth of transfers in August.
If you get promotion you then need to bring in 5/6 starters. The jump in quality is just too much not to.
Yes but he had a backbone that was transferable. I don't think we could have said that the past couple of years.
Quote from: General on September 01, 2016, 05:33:19 PM
by that logic, the players that we came down with originally (although Magath cleared a few out) should've been able to play in the championship easily. That as we all know, ended up not being the case.
No, that squad was dreadful. Over the hill, overpaid, under committed, disorganised. Not even championship standard
Quote from: Statto on September 02, 2016, 01:17:02 AM
Of course someone needs to point out to the General that the clubs coming down (including us in 2014) were evidently not good enough for the premiership, hence they got relegated
But it's still the case that if they kept their squads intact (which they never can do) they'd go straight back up 90% of the time
For the record, of the 14 players that featured in our last game before we were relegated, 12 were offloaded that summer. That is of course excluding probably the two most gifted, Ruiz and Berbatov, who were sent out on loan long before that
Had we kept it intact, could have lined up something like this in the championship
Stockdale
Riether - Heitinga - Hangeland - Riise
Parker - Holtby/Kasami
Dejagah - Berbatov - Ruiz
Mitroglou
QED
