honeybradger

Marcelino Nunez who assisted the Sara goal is also an excellent dead ball specialist. Yes the goals you linked were well worked but also had an excellent delivery on both. If you look at Sara's assists last season a lot were simply excellent deliveries and not much trickery.

Ipswich have managed to bring in players like Jacob Greaves, Jack Clarke, Smodizcs and we have brought in Okoli, Cordova Reid and Ayew. You cant seriously argue in good faith that we are going for a higher profile of player than Ipswich. They were also linked with players like Ionnadis but at the end of the day they have been able to land far better players for almost the same price.

I have a question for every poster on here who believes that signing players like Ayew = survival in the PL. Where is the evidence? Genuinely what makes you think that adding Ayew to this team will suddenly allow us to start grinding out wins? In Crystal palace's case last season in the 8 games where Ayew did not start they won 6 and lost 2 for a 75% win ratio. In the games where he did start they won 7 drew 10 and lost 13 which is a 23% win ratio. It's not a coincidence that Crystal Palace's run of form last season coincided with Ayew falling out of favour.

Everything you have brought up just highlights how short sighted we are as a club. Norwich scored the most from set pieces last season because they had an excellent dead ball specialist in Gabriel Sara. We have no dead ball specialist at the club and therefore our set pieces do not have the delivery to be effective. Furthermore the entire signing of the Norwich set piece coach based on his record at Norwich seems like poor business as we look disorganised whilst defending set pieces. It almost seems like we looked at Norwich's record and didnt bother to look any further into why it was working out for them I.e. not the set piece coach.

Considering we have spent £25mil on Skipp and £8mil on Ayew £30mil for this guy would be a robbery.

You're in for a shock. Ayew loses the ball as much as any other winger/striker in the league. That's not a strength of his.

£8mil to sign a player on a 2 year contract . PSR wise that's the equivalent of signing a player for £20mil on a 5 year deal. Give us a transfer ban now please FA, we will be a lot better off.

Us not making another transfer this summer is the best business we can do right now. With our transfer team as it is right now we dont want any more transfers being made.

Hopefully no more transfers.

He was really bad whenever he played under Rodgers if we're being honest apart from the odd game. Fair play to him though he has really turned his career around here.

That backwards flick was one of few good things he did. He just gets tackled too easily for me and his passing is sloppy. He has a lot of the same flaws as Mcateer has in his game but if we didnt know their age I would have guessed Cordova Reid was young and inexperienced and Mcateer was the Prem proven one based on their performances in the game.

I forgot Soumare but you're right he was worse than Reid. The gap between Reid and the next worst performer was quite big though.

It's not proper competition though because Reid doesnt have a serious claim to the spot outside of the Prem proven tag. Mavididi is clearly the better player and should be starting on merit. I would understand if we had brought in a good player to compete for the spot but Reid was our worst performer by a margin on Monday. Unless Reid improves significantly from pre season and the Spurs game then even if Mavididi is hungrier in the 10 minutes he comes on/the occasional start we are still worse off as a team because we have to put up with Reid who is worse than a less hungry Mavididi.

Fatawu shouldnt be the barometer for wingers who track back. He is as good defensively as any winger I have seen honestly. Mavididi does actually put in a decent shift defensively, I'm not sure where the idea that he doesnt comes from. I am also not sure that Cordova Reid is any better at tracking back than Mavididi, he certainly didnt help much defensively against Spurs.

you would have thought the same about Cordova Reid starting over Mavididi as well.

This justification of spending a pile of money on poor players because it may earn us £100mil in Prem money does not make sense to me. Sunderland did the same and it left them with a team of deadwood they couldn't shift and ended up crashing into league one. Unsurprisingly we are more likely to stay up if we spend our money on good players. The only reason you are trying to justify it is that these transfers are being made by the club you support. If it was Norwich who signed Okoli, Skipp, Cordova Reid and Ayew for £40mil we would all be wondering what on earth they were doing. We would all be saying they would be going straight back down and would be questioning how they are going to shift all these players when they do so. The only reason we cannot admit that we are making some major mistakes in the transfer market is because we don't want a core part of our lives to be a source of negativity, whereas with another club we can brush it off as another team doing awful business who won't be a threat.

I am not sure what game you watched on Monday if you think Cordova Reid will reliably provide a 7/10 performance when called upon. We will be lucky to see a 7/10 performance from him in his next 5 games.

Yes we got a decent result on Monday but our transfer movement has been poor. 6 mil on a 33 year old Ayew would top off one of our worst transfer windows in terms of player quality for the level we require and the amount we've spent on them. We will be relying on players already at the club before the summer to keep us up.

Not like we can get away with playing Soumare against the top 6 either, he was honking. I think we would have been much better off with Ricardo and even might have had a chance to go on and win the game.

What happened to that Mahina kid there was all that hype over a few years ago?

He played in midfield for us plenty of times last season and was better than Soumare and Choudhury have been there. There were quite a few games with Ricardo in midfield and Choudhury at right back even.

Surely we could have subbed in Ricardo instead of Soumare though. Having him as an unused option on the bench doesnt feel right.

I mean Ricardo is 30 now and has been consistently excellent for us when played apart from the 4-2 at Bournemouth in his first season. We should be maximising his playing time (whilst avoiding overplaying him due to injuries) whilst we can. We haven't had many players better than him in our history, it's such a shame to not use him when he's finally fit.

To be fair Vardy doesnt do much to break the mold of boring TV interviews.

Mcateer is probably a good example of how the loan system can fail young players. Went on loan to a league 2 side and hardly played. Stayed with us the following season and got far more minutes playing for the best side in the championship and that's despite him being injured for a decent spell. Now it looks like he's going to be one of the first options off the bench for a PL side. Loans arent the fix all for young players like they are made out to be, in Mcateer's case they could very well have ruined him had Maresca not given him a chance. I say keep him and let him adjust to the Prem.