Consistency

[Sting of the North]

Our recruitment needs to plan for only getting players on "winter deadline day" and "summer deadline day", which means buying the players needed for pre-season in the winter transfer window. Tony Khan keeps trying to get players in early, but the players don't want to join early when better teams are still interested and that is never going to change as much as TK wants next season to be different.

I noted that Jokanovic was hoping to get good starts to a season but never had the the support of the Director of Football in providing him with exactly what he needed.  His tenure was consequently on a knife edge every November when our league position didn't look as promising as we all hoped it would.  Eventually Jokanovic was ejected for failing to find solutions.  If the same principal were applied to our current Director of Football he would never have been near an English professional club in any capacity other than, perhaps, a hospitality worker.   His capacity to find and sign players is highly questionnable and always has been.

wasnt the team that went up largely unchanged from the team that made the play offs the year before, so how does that factor into your arguement. And no Chris Martin wasn't a loss, so his lack of replacement doesn't count.

We lost a left back, a right winger and a striker - and didn't find  suitable replacements for 2 of them until 6 months later in the January window. Just because you subjectively don't want to count Martin it doesn't mean that he didn't need replacing.

he didn't need replacing because we were better when he was dropped. And our good run started before the January reinforcements arrived.

Slav obviously wanted a replacement, regardless of what you think about Martin. We also did not play better at the beginning of that season as compared to the end of the season before so you are wrong about us being better (at least in the sense of accumulating points).

I also never stated that our good run did not start before the January reinforcements, because Slav managed to find solutions and get the team working despite the lack of sufficient cover in certain positions. I find it likely though that we wouldn't have gone 23 games unbeaten without Mitro and Targett.

[toshes mate]

I am still waiting for someone to produce evidence that our recruitment team can operate in any other way than consistently badly without trying to dazzle us via one match team line ups which we know from subsequent results and changes made didn't work.  And if we didn't need a striker and left back then how come TK moved heaven and earth to get his dad to come up with the readies for Mitrovic's loan and the loan of Matt Targett in January?  Perhaps it was because Jokanovic had spelled out his need for a replacement for both Malone and Martin well before the season started but TK just wasn't capable of doing the job he occupied.