This transfer window is starting to follow a familiar path.
Posted on August 19th, 2010 | 158 Comments |
The mood was optimistic and getting promoted so early would surely mean we could steal a march on the competition in the transfer market, right?
Wrong, or so it seems. Here we are with only 13 days of the transfer window remaining, and still we await some key additions to our squad as we preapre to fight for our Premier League lives.
I’m not suggesting that the squad we have currently can’t survive as I believe they can, if we are able to field our best eleven in every game that is, and given our record with injuries any chance of that happening would seem unlikely. I’m also not suggesting that we won’t sign anybody else in this window, we may well do. But the way this transfer window is working out certainly has a sense of deja-vu about it.
All summer long we have had dialogue from Hughton suggesting that we would have new players by the start of pre-season, then the end of pre-season, then the start of the season. In fairness, we have had some new players signed in the shape of James Perch, Dan Gosling and Sol Campbell, but the the word from Hughton is that he is still searching for another two players, and no doubt those players will be signed just before the bell tolls on another transfer window.
This window is beginning to have the hallmark of Mike Ashley all over it, but then again we were at least warned this time around. The way I see is that Ashley had a chance to tap into that feel-good factor that had surrounded Newcastle after promotion and fuel that by offering a sensible budget for new players. He fluffed his lines.
Of course, the definition of sensible is open for debate. I would have said £20 million, spent wisely, would have pretty much guaranteed safety, and another year of Premier League income to boot. That sensible investment would appear to be very unlikely to happen.
You could look at it from another perspective and say that Hughton and Ashley have enough faith in our current team to survive without the need for many additions, which would be commendable, but it would also be a massive gamble.
As I have said all along, I will wait until the window shuts until I pass a full and frank judgement on how the wondow has gone, but it doesn’t look too promising at the minute. If we survive without an outlay on players it would be great, brilliant, ground-breaking. However, if we don’t survive I want to hear nothing from Ashley and his cohorts about how relegation has a massive finanical impact on the club.
After all, it will have been his fault!
* * * * * * * * * Krul
* L.Young ** Collo ** Sol ** Enrique
Bentley * Ben Arfa * Vukic * Jonas
* * * * * * * * Jo * Carroll