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Summer Transfer Window 2018.


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hail you then. the mfc gospel of players we should & shouldn't have. if only the club would appoint you in an important position.

 

You said it.  With all of the great work we've done in the transfer windows over the last couple of years they probably don't need me though.

 

well if you think Bamford is the answer, your probably right there. they certainly don't need you pal!!!

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.@Marvinjohnson28 has completed a loan move to @SUFC_tweets, subject to clearance

 

Thank God for that, after failing to sign any wingers the best thing we could do was get rid of one of the few we have left.

 

I know the point you're making, but Marvin Johnson is absolute turd. Pulis would, and will, rather play with no width at all rather than play with a player who is so far behind the required standard (plus I always get the impression that Johnson has a terrible attitude, admittedly without any proper proof). Plus we have to assume that we'll primarily play with wing-backs now, in which case McQueen will have been Johnson's replacement rather than anyone we may have brought in today.

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well if you think Bamford is the answer, your probably right there. they certainly don't need you pal!!!

 

I'm pretty sure they actually signed him.  

 

Twice  :D

 

I didn't say he was the answer, I'm not sure what the question is that you are looking for an answer to, I just think he's better than Hugill.

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Also, just in case anyone missed it, Pulis said we missed out on two attackers that he desperately wanted.

 

Just watched that post-match video. I imagine that's Puncheon and Adomah who we missed out on. Pretty much confirms that the reason Batth is here is because of playing 3 at the back.

 

Is it just me or did he also say something along the lines of Wolves saying they'd look after us in terms of that signing which I thought was a bit strange given that as far as we know, we didn't do them any favours, we forced them to pay the full whack for Adama. Unless we actually didn't and we did them a favour with it somewhere along the line? Surely given how long it was drawn out for (in my eyes anyway) that them being forced to pay the big money all up front is the absolute opposite of us doing them a favour. If they paid the release clause in the manner they had to to sign the player, we've actually been quite stubborn with them and not met them anywhere in the middle.

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well if you think Bamford is the answer, your probably right there. they certainly don't need you pal!!!

 

I'm pretty sure they actually signed him.  

 

Twice  :D

 

I didn't say he was the answer, I'm not sure what the question is that you are looking for an answer to, I just think he's better than Hugill.

 

Out of interest CT, with the service Assombalonga received tonight, who do you think would have been better? Bamford or Hugill?

 

I prefer Bamford and think he’s a better player but think Hugill is better suited to the system we are going to play. Whether we agree with that system is a completely different discussion.

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well if you think Bamford is the answer, your probably right there. they certainly don't need you pal!!!

 

I'm pretty sure they actually signed him.  

 

Twice  :D

 

I didn't say he was the answer, I'm not sure what the question is that you are looking for an answer to, I just think he's better than Hugill.

 

Out of interest CT, with the service Assombalonga received tonight, who do you think would have been better? Bamford or Hugill?

 

I prefer Bamford and think he’s a better player but think Hugill is better suited to the system we are going to play. Whether we agree with that system is a completely different discussion.

 

The system we seem to have settled on (been forced into) is 5-3-2 in which the two should really play together. Bamford in the 10 role hugill as 9. However CT is right. Bamford is the better player, technically

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Out of interest CT, with the service Assombalonga received tonight, who do you think would have been better? Bamford or Hugill?

 

I prefer Bamford and think he’s a better player but think Hugill is better suited to the system we are going to play. Whether we agree with that system is a completely different discussion.

 

That's a fair question.  In terms of style of play you'd probably favour Hugill because he's the more physical of the two and works his socks off.  He's busy, he gets about, he puts defenders under pressure because he's always on their case.  In short he's a handful and probably a pain in the *** to defend against.  However I think the difference in ability between them is such that Bamford over the course of a season would still do better.  Hugill's best season ever is 12 goals in 44 games for Preston.  Last season, before he moved to West Ham, he got 8 goals in 27 games.  Bamford under Pulis bettered that in fewer games and about half the mins of game time and he was stuck out on the left for at least some of those games.  

 

When I have seen Preston play, they seemed to play to Hugill's strengths but his record is still relatively poor. Bamford playing out of position half the time for a team not playing to his strengths scored more.  It could just be one of those things - perhaps Hugill being here and playing with better players will lead to him scoring more goals for example and hopefully that's exactly what will happen.  But if Hugill wasn't at West Ham I'd be surprised if many would have been clamouring for his signing because other than being a bit of a handful there's not much to suggest he's the guy to fire us to promotion.

 

To turn it around though, if at the end of last season someone had said the only attacking addition we're going to make is Hugill and we're going to sell Traore and Bamford, what would people have made of that?  This started because I said we'd only made one attacking signing this summer and he was inferior to the striker we let go.  I think that's fair comment obviously but others may well disagree.  I'd be surprised if he was at the top of many lists at the end of last season though.

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Out of interest CT, with the service Assombalonga received tonight, who do you think would have been better? Bamford or Hugill?

 

I prefer Bamford and think he’s a better player but think Hugill is better suited to the system we are going to play. Whether we agree with that system is a completely different discussion.

 

That's a fair question.  In terms of style of play you'd probably favour Hugill because he's the more physical of the two and works his socks off.  He's busy, he gets about, he puts defenders under pressure because he's always on their case.  In short he's a handful and probably a pain in the *** to defend against.  However I think the difference in ability between them is such that Bamford over the course of a season would still do better.  Hugill's best season ever is 12 goals in 44 games for Preston.  Last season, before he moved to West Ham, he got 8 goals in 27 games.  Bamford under Pulis bettered that in fewer games and about half the mins of game time and he was stuck out on the left for at least some of those games.  

 

When I have seen Preston play, they seemed to play to Hugill's strengths but his record is still relatively poor. Bamford playing out of position half the time for a team not playing to his strengths scored more.  It could just be one of those things - perhaps Hugill being here and playing with better players will lead to him scoring more goals for example and hopefully that's exactly what will happen.  But if Hugill wasn't at West Ham I'd be surprised if many would have been clamouring for his signing because other than being a bit of a handful there's not much to suggest he's the guy to fire us to promotion.

 

To turn it around though, if at the end of last season someone had said the only attacking addition we're going to make is Hugill and we're going to sell Traore and Bamford, what would people have made of that?  This started because I said we'd only made one attacking signing this summer and he was inferior to the striker we let go.  I think that's fair comment obviously but others may well disagree.  I'd be surprised if he was at the top of many lists at the end of last season though.

 

27 games? is that right? they sold him in january so still half a season to go. could well have got 20 in the league the way he was going. anyway back to the different types of players they are:

 

hugill is a more complete centre forward. in the old fashioned sense. a proper old school number 10. paddy is more a number 9 and less suited to the modern day lone striker role, especially in a champo team.

 

paddy might well have better stats over a full season when comparing the two. but what you dont get from the stats is how playing a striker like hugill also improves the team overall so the actual team round him might well get better stats.

 

look at the leeds game last night. how many times did britt contest with a cb for a lofted ball? a dozen maybe more. paddy would lose most of them(as he always did) hugill will win the majority in them situations as ruddy would. although he has more to his game than ruddy. he adds to the team. 

 

not sure how hugill will fair in the box with the ball at his feet.compared to bitt or paddy but if crosses are coming in hugill will defiantly be far superior. looking forward to seeing him fit and playing regular for us.

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I completely agree with you on that final bit. I am very disappointed that the only attacking addition we have made is Hugill. If I had been shown our current squad at the start of the summer and told that’s the squad we would finish the window with I would have been extremely disappointed.

 

I also agree with many of your other points. I do think Bamford will score more goals than Hugill this season, even in the system we are playing I think Bamford would probably still score more goals.

 

However a lot of the argument for Bamford is based on goals. As a striker, scoring goals is certainly their primary job. But it isn’t their only job. In the system that we will play this season, the striker will have a massive role in holding balls up to relieve pressure on our defence and get us up the pitch, bringing midfielders into play, battling with defenders for balls aimlessly pumped up to him and defending from the front.

 

Bamford will probably score more individually than Hugill but surely if we score more and concede less with Hugill in the team then it’s for the better. That’s not to say that we definitely will score more and concede less with Hugill in the team. But I do feel that with the attributes he offers us in comparison to Bamford, in the system that we play, there is a reasonable argument to be had that that would be the case. We will never know either way. I was as disappointed to see Bamford leave as anyone. Bamford is the type of striker I’d love to see us build our team around. But we have Pulis as manager and while we do, we might as well have players that suit his system and I think Hugill probably suits it better than Bamford.

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Well I said I would wait until the end of the window to express my thoughts, so here we go.

 

It's not ideal. It's not the disaster some are making it out to be, but it's not ideal. The important thing is that we have bodies in, because going into Millwall and having a bench full of kids and players the manager doesn't want was a bit ridiculous (and I know the kids have done alright, before anyone says anything, but I'm talking about reliability over the season).

How much those bodies improve the squad remains to be seen. It's unfair to ask the club to be able to replace special talents like Gibson and Adama, but Flint's done okay, and the wing-back system has been a bit of a surprise success.

 

For me, there's a feeling of the promotion season under Karanka about this, when we lost more exciting players (Bamford, Tomlin, Vossen), but replaced them with more solid and consistent ones (Nugent, Stuani, Downing). But of course, we did need that mercurial influence in Gastón when it came to January, so I hope the club are going to get to work even at this early stage, to identify who that man could be this year, if needed.

 

Besic and Flint are first team players, no issues with either of them. McNair is a utility player who I think will see 20+ starts this season in various positions, and seems like a decent player. Lonergan is a squad GK, probably on low wages, fine. McQueen could be a canny signing, in a position where we needed competition, but I hope he actually gets the games and it's not a Jack Harrison situation.

Hugill is a player I know we all want to do well,with his hometown hero story. In relation to the above discussion CT posed, I don't think he's as good a player as Bamford, but I see the logic in signing him. Now that Braithwaite is sticking around, I'm pretty intrigued by the idea of the two of them up top together. Saville & Batth are strange ones, especially given the effort and money we've put into Saville. I suppose we have to wait that one out an see what Tony's master plan is before we make too many judgements on that one. Batth is the definition of 'just getting an extra body in', and is Exhibit A in the case of 'How We Know We're Definitely Playing 3-5-2 Til January'. Which makes sense from the perspective that when Ayala inevitably breaks into pieces again, we're not forced to change formations.

 

Speaking of formations, I think there's an unfair current running through this forum that Pulis has somehow 'stumbled' upon this formation and 'got lucky'. I think that does him a huge disservice (I don't ever want to think of Pulis getting lucky, incidentally). As I've said before, I'm still not sold on the Pulis project, but he's earned a season to do what he needs to do, and he's a pragmatist who uses the tools he has. Shotton being a decent wing-back isn't some surprise that he's found by accident, he's known Shotton since his youth days at Stoke, and has presumably seen the attributes that he can play there. We know that it's not what Pulis wants to do in an ideal world, but for one reason or another, this is how we're probably going to play, and you have to credit the manager if it's going well.

 

In terms of outgoings, Traore was impossible to hang onto, and Gibson very difficult to do so. I liked Fabio, but he seemed pretty desperate to go, was never going to get into the team. The rest will hardly be missed, except Bamford. I think that one will end up biting us on the ***, but I hope that's just a side note to the story of Hugill's 20+ goal season.

 

As for the 'maybes', it's here that my real gripe lies. Why were we not trying to replace Adama before he was sold? If he had a release clause, surely there was always a high chance he was going to go? We should have had a list there and then. The only wingers we've signed in the last 2 years are Marvin Johnson and Jack Harrison. There is a huge blind spot with the recruitment team there, and it's a concern that the fact that we 'nearly' got Adomah and/or Bolasie doesn't really arrest. However, the light in that tunnel is the fact that we have two very promising young wingers on the books, who may now be required in the campaign. So if we end up getting some use out of them this year, it may yet be a blessing in disguise.

 

Speaking of people still here, Braithwaite. He's got a decision to make now. Sit and sulk, or knuckle down. His form this season suggests he's not really one to do the former, so fingers crossed we still get the player who's turned up so far this season. Hanging onto him might end up being more important than any new signing we did or didn't make this season.

 

Finally, Gill and Bauser have to go. Rubbish.

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Supporters before the window opened

It’s embarasing we overpay for players then get stuck with them and sell them cheaper .

Supporters at the end of the window .

We should have just payed what they wanted. It’s embarasing

 

Quotes please

 

Would you like names and NI numbers aswell

 

I’d like you to not just make stuff up

 

So which part haven’t you heard

The guys that say we’ve overspent on players the ones that think we lose money on players or the ones that say we should just give them what they want

I’d like you not to come out with smart *** comments but I’ve got even less chance

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So, albeit playing a system that our manager doesn’t prefer, we seem to have settled on a system that suits our current group of players quite well. Plus, we have added players that I hope will improve and enable us to maintain the system for a full season and eventually what to me looks like a serious push for promotion.

 

I was initially somewhat skeptical after selling what was imo our three best players, possibly our fourth too with Martin seeming to leave. Now however, I am more optimistic and this is why:

 

We look like a team that are set up as hard to beat, and having the ability to turn tough games in our favor. Its a mix of graft and guile, with real quality from back to front. We have options and at least what i would call adequate cover for every position. Plus, we have a midfield that can do whatever required. We are no longer having trouble creating chances against the best teams, or loosing, but are actually turning tough fixtures into wins or draws.

 

Goalkeeper options:

 

Randolph is as good as it gets at this level, with the only obvious weakness his commanding of the area. Our centrebacks are more than capable of handling that

 

Our three at the back:

Ayala, Flint and Fry looks solid atm. Adding both a goal threat from set pieces and Fry’s eye for a pass. It looks really good imo. Friend, Shotton, Batth and possibly Clayton in a Connor Coady like role makes us look well equipped imo.

 

Our left side looks well equipped, with three options if you include Downing. Although neither looks as defensively sound as i would have liked, all three offers an attacking threat. Particularly Downing and McQueen.

 

Our right hand side is an obvious question mark considering the length of the season. Shotton initially looking a square peg in a round hole, but I am so impressed of what he brings. Plus his long throw is a nightmare to defend. We dont have any obvious backup, but McNair is capable by the looks of it. In retrospect, selling Christie and Fabio looks odd with us suddenly playing wing backs with seemingly no proper wing back but I would be willing to argue that the options we have now are actually doing the job quite well.

 

Our midfield three options looks fantastic imo. It has a lot of running through Besic, Howson and Saville. Clayton can defend our defense, as can Besic and possibly Leadbitter. Downing can add class alongside Saville. We can swamp an opponent, we can contain the ball quite well, but most important, we will be hard to break down because of the pure energy our Midfield brings. Hopefully, both Saville and McNair can add an actual goal threat. We have a lot of great options for midfield, and that is not even including Wing and Tavernier who are both more attack minded. Surely, we can only play three from the nine at the time, but we have a wast pool of players to choose from, capable of setting us up both to be hard to beat, master a pressing game and simply recycle the ball well and be creative.

 

As for our attacking options, maybe we dont have pace on the wings, and the terrific dribbling skill from Adam and his ability to win free kicks for our Pulis-ball. We have different options still, and our attackers offers different qualities then what maybe Pulis would like, but still something that makes us very efficient and hard to beat.

 

To me, the key is Braitwhaite, for adding skill and a link between midfield and attack. I am so glad he is still our player, and we should back him the best we can. To me, he has been a terrific professional. Assombalonga offers pace and goal threat. Hugill graft and great defense from the front. Fletcher has pace and can break quickly. They are all different options, with the only obvious question for me being if they are capable scoring enough goals. I cant really see any scoring the 20+ goals expected from an attacker in a promotion winning side. Our fifth option being Gestede, who I think it’s obvious isn’t right for us as a lone striker. As an option from the bench however is fantastic. He has a terrific leap and just the thought of having to defend a long throw or other set piece pushing 90 minutes with the likes of Ayala, Flint, Batth, Hugill and Gestede is terrifying to me as an old defender. We were already one of the best teams in the championship for set pieces, and I’d be very surprised if anyone can come even close to us come May.

 

Even after loosing arguably our three best players, we do look the better team this season. This might not be what we have wanted, but the signings of Saville and not least Batth tells me that we at least had a backup plan at the ready: 352, and for this I’m very happy. Yes, we have missed out on quite a few players, but I still think we have been lucky recruitment-vice, with all players coming in actually offering something to our team. This is no fluke, and to me, Pulis is a terrific pragmatic. I didn't really look forward with great anticipation when he first was appointed, but he has now won me over. There is so much more to him then what I first expected.

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I've said it before but now the window is closed and we know what we're working with for the next 4 months and indeed how disappointed we've been in our attempts to bring certain players in and missing out for one reason or another... I'm forced to ask what the strategy was and why that was the case.

 

So is it as alluded and that whilst doing 2 early deals, we've waited until the butt end of the window for prices to fall? There was such a confidence in this when it was talked about. "That's how I prefer to do my business" is what I'm sure Pulis has said. Well I'm sorry but he can't come out and say he only likes doing a large chunk of his business late on and then sit a hugely frustrated figure at the fact his wishes haven't been fulfilled.

 

Put it this way, what did we accomplish from his late business? Was £6m for Besic a sufficiently lower valuation to earlier in the window? Well we never spent that in the end but that's also because things were left so late that his agent decided to move the goalposts and we had no time to negotiate. Is £8m for Saville a low valuation or is it actually overpriced? I guess we'll see over the course of the season. But spending that amount of money on a position we have tons of options in doesn't go down very well either, I think Pulis has a bigger point to prove with that signing than the lad himself.

 

But hey, he might not have got exactly what he wants and we still have a solid if unspectacular squad for the next 4 months. But there is a genuine concern over us getting found out and having very little dynamism in our squad. The young lads are going to struggle to make the bench so the difference in what they offer makes very little difference until we get injuries IMO. Wing is the last man standing from that group and will surely be replaced by Saville.

 

As for recruitment, I also think there's a big task on their hands to find that difference maker for this team. Their job isn't over, they don't get to waltz off thinking their job is done for the next 4 months. They need to be scouring the world for a couple who will turn this solid team into a 3-points winning machine.

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