Toon close to Gosling signing.
Posted on July 19th, 2010 | 168 Comments |
Reports suggest that Gosling is in line to sign a four year deal on Tyneside, with Friday being the most likely day for an announcement going by some rough calculation and guesswork.
Basically, Everton had 14 days to appeal Dan Gosling’s decision to leave Goodison Park after that now infamous contract cock-up. And using my memory and some mental arithmetic, I calculated that the 14 day appeal period will be up on Friday, although please feel free to correct me if I am wrong, which would indicate that we should have a new midfield player by the weekend, if it all comes off of course!
Signing Gosling as soon as possible would be a good move for the club and would put an end to the rumours that other clubs like West Ham, Sunderland and Bolton are circling for the former Plymouth youngster. But that is all it would do as the player himself is unfortunately out until around Christmas time as he recovers from a cruciate ligament injury.
The problem is, what do we do with all of these central midfielders? Can we expect any of them to move on in January, or even before perhaps? It makes me wonder, especially as Gosling has apparently said that he wants to play in his favoured central midfield position.
As it stands we have Kevin Nolan, Alan Smith, Joey Barton, Danny Guthrie and Haris Vuckic who can all play in the central midfield position. Add Dan Gosling into that equation and that would amount to a grand total of six central midfielders in our squad, yet only two and at most three can play at a time.
I understand the need for depth in the squad, but to me the squad is becoming laden with players who can play in the middle of the park, which is leaving both wings look a little bit light. I know Guthrie and Barton have played on the wings, as did Vuckic the other day and apparently so can Gosling, but they aren’t out and out wingers, and that concerns me for when injury inevitably strikes either Wayne Routledge or Jonas Gutierrez.
I’m not moaning about the apparently imminent capture of Gosling, in fact I think it’s a great bit of business for us. I don’t even mind that we signed him because of a technicality, it was Everton’s balls up after all. I just think that perhaps we should focus some more attention into positions where we are despereately light and lacking in quality, like left-back, left-wing and up front.
If we can crack those three positions and sign players that would add to the quality of the squad then I would feel more confident in our ability to cope when injuries inevitably strike.
Are you listening, Chris?
NUFCBlog Author: toonsy
toonsy has written 643 articles on this blog.
We should just announce the bleedin’ Gosling transfer! Everton haven’t a chance in hell of ANY money! They cocked up the admin and will suffer for it, it’s not as if they continually offered him contracts and he kept rejecting in order to leave on a free. Not to mention he has only been there just over 2 years and was not developed by the club. I feel more sorry for Plymouth Argyle than Everton. We should do the classy thing and give them 300k or so