- Joined
- Aug 19, 2023
- Messages
- 88
Very sensitive post.
People complain about the lack of strategy but to me it looks like for once they’re planning for the future.
Replacing the players you can without sacrificing too much depth (which explains why we weren’t that desperate to get rid of Maguire and McT, as much as we may hate them here they can provide depth and be correct squad players), getting in younger players because the squad is ageing, getting more « system players » than individual game changers, and give time to the manager to get his squad.
We’re not yet at the stage where the team needs a bit of tweaking to be competitive.
Look at Arsenal and Liverpool, over which people are creaming themselves here, they didn’t have overnight success, and had some pretty shit periods before being competitive.
I just don't see the future-planning when it comes to the midfield. First we signed Casemiro for his twilight years (and I think that his leadership is what the squad needs btw, just that it's not exactly forward-planning). Second we signed Mount in the last year of his contract as 'one for the future' (massively overpaying in the process) when we could have held our cards to our chest and tried to get him on a free next year. Third we jettisoned our one specialist backup DM/CM (Fred) leaving us ridiculously short in the first three games of the season, and everyone screaming for an Amrabat-type player, our midfield totally exposed.
Fair enough, the manager wanted Mount over everyone else I suppose, and we can argue on whether that's the right idea or not, or whether we're now understaffed, but it seems so temporary and off-the-cuff. Forward-thinking clubs have transfer gurus to handle the long-term approach to the transfer market and don't allow the manager full control, and this mitigates some of the player-side risk of changing managers (i.e. new manager having a bunch of square pegs for round holes like United in the last decade). If it all goes pear-shaped for ETH, I'd be amazed if Mount played his way into a more conventional midfield structure, unless we sign Superman for the CDM role.