Keep the faith in Hughton.
Posted on April 30th, 2010 | 118 Comments |
The thought was that given the fact that Newcastle United have gone about the business of promotion quietly and efficiently, and secured their Premier League place for next season in record time, that this could signal some early transfer activity as we seek to get a headstart on other teams who are also looking to strenghten. People are now starting to point out that other teams are beginning to strengthen their squads, with Liverpool capturing the signature of current Charlton midfielder, Jonjo Shelvey. But that is the only confirmed transfer activity as yet so I feel the early activity of other teams is being somewhat overstated.
Chris Hughton has been quick to play down any rumours of summer signings and has only gone as far as saying that we are looking to strengthen in the right areas. That is the right approach in my opinion and is a manoeuvre we should be getting used to from Hughton, a man who always looks to keep his cards close to his chest. The days of the media announcing new players before we get to hear about it appear to be over.
This appears to be true to form, and in fact you only have to look back to January to see the proof that this is the way to go. Going into the winter transfer window, many of us feared that we would be lucky to escape selling any players, and signing any new faces would be a distant dream. Look what happened, not only did we keep all of our senior players, we saw a number of new arrivals through the door without ‘man in the know’ David Craig catching any sort of wind of it. That was probably our most successful and hassle free transfer window to date by all accounts.
So what can we learn from January?
Well from piecing together bits and bobs and mixing them with a bit of common sense thinking, I would say we could learn quite a lot form January. We know that Hughton, Ashley and Llambias seem to work well together, and that Ashley seems to listen to Hughton. We also know that the scouts are out and about looking for players that would strengthen the squad, with Graham Carr having been particularly busy since his arrival as Chief Scout. It would also appear that the actions from Mike Ashley in January seem to indicate that he actually wants this club to be in the Premier League, and logic dictates that he will want to be able to give Chris Hughton what he thinks will be enough to avoid relegation. After all, from a financial perspective there is no logic in being a yo-yo club.
So that is what we can deduce from this season, and I guess the moral of the story is just because the club appears to be sailng along quietly, it doesn’t mean there isn’t any hard work going on at the helm. Signings will come in their own time, and I think we can be reasonably assured that Chris Hughton already knows what players he would like. It would be foolish to reveal any targets at this stage as it would leave Newcastle open to direct competition from other clubs for a particular player. Watch this space.
Have faith in Hughton!
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