CM - Hackney > Barlaser
This is the take away for me; I think Carrick (and the squad) have done well to be so close to the top 6, given a combination of injuries and new players bedding in, mainly youngsters and players with no championship experience.
Not forgetting pace as not being equal amongst replacements. When Lath and Jones (and to a lesser extent Bangura) were out, the lack of pace massively impacted how we were able to play, regardless of whether it looked like we had a decent backup ready and waiting.
Exactly this. You can't pick a player of the season this year as I don't think anyone has played the full season! It's a little ridiculous. If you did have to pick, I'd go RVDB though
This is true. Some of them are downgrades but not massively so. We're talking about players that are 7 or 8 out of 10 being replaced by players that are 6 or 7 out of 10. Our problem this season is we have no 10s or 9s, not that we have lost our 7s and 8s for a bit of time.
I see that as we are not good enough to be challenging for the automatics and not that we aren't good enough to be scraping the playoffs. We are good enough to scrape the playoffs and injuries have probably set us back a bit. I still think that is a failure of the club to only be in a position where with a fully fit squad we could have scraped the playoffs when last season we were of the best 3 teams in the league. The team that wins the race to 6th rarely goes on to win promotion. It is far more likely that the team that fails to get the autos goes on to win the playoffs because they are the better team. We have fallen massively in quality because we lost all of our star players and replaced them with players that are a lower quality.
Or to put it another way, on average we have had 4 first team players missing every game.......and often we've had their backups missing at the same time.
Agreed, it was a big ask. By moving away from the loan market for our core team, we have largely removed one of those factors. If we want Bill next year, it's an easy signing, O'Brien is probably the only other we would consider and he will probably be a fairly easy signing. too, should we decide to. There should be greater continuity next season, not just in the first XI but also in the squad. That should help us hit the ground running this time.
I do think that is underplaying it. We are not far off scraping in the playoffs as it is, so with a fully fit squad it's not unreasonable to think we would be comfortatbly in them and not far off the top.
Not sure I concur with that. Hackney's replacement is effectively Barlaser, Barlaser can't travel with the ball, he can't effectively receive the ball under pressure and turn. That's a massive down grade in that role.
But if we would have kept Chuba we wouldn't have had many of the players we signed, and he would have left for free in a couple of weeks. I wish we could have agreed an extension, but we got 10m more than we expected a year earlier and that allowed us to buy and sell Rogers, and sign Rav and Dieng.
Dieng was in goal for our worst run of the season.
We signed most whilst Akpom was still with us didn't we, wasn't he in the bench at the start of the season?
That doesn’t mean the two weren’t related and didn’t Lath our most expensive signing come after Akpom had left?
Possibly but it doesn't mean that the funds from that deal were required. We've made a couple of major sales in the last couple of years, without splashing big money. I think we had money in the kitty from the Spence and Tavernier transfers.
Was that at the beginning of the season when there were other mitigating factors. Certainly the periord after chelsea and Sunderland game glover was absymal for about 8 or 9 games