Wayne to Bridge the gap at left-back?
Posted on August 17th, 2011 | 42 Comments |
This is one from the Daily Mail. They claim we’d consider paying £80k/week to bring Wayne Bridge to Newcastle on a season long loan if we don’t manage to sign Erik Pieters.
Personally, I think that’s poppycock and the Mail doesn’t even attempt to justify its claims in any way whatsoever. It merely states that we will ‘consider a fresh move’ for the player if all else fails.
I rather suspect such ‘consideration’ will amount to about 2 minutes of side-splitting laughter from board room at St James’ Park. Manchester City are apparently not keen to pay any of Bridge’s wages if he goes out on loan and there are even rumours that they want £2m up front merely for the privilege of loaning a player from them.
I really can’t see any of this appealing to Ashley’s methods of running a football club. And rightly so in this case. We need to ‘build’ a team for the seasons ahead rather than just plug holes in it for the short term.
There really is no excuse. Enrique’s departure has been on the cards for months so we should have been well-prepared for it. Then again we’ve allegedly been looking for some sort of ‘Carroll replacement’ since January and still haven’t got one (unless you happen to think Demba Ba is it), so we should hardly be surprised.
Rumour has it that Erik Pieters will cost £6m and 30k/week in wages, which seems reasonable enough for an international left-back, so – assuming the player has been scouted properly and is what we’re after in a left-back – that’s where our priorities should lie.
Aly Cissokho is allegedly our ‘backup target’ if we make no progress with Pieters, although as far as I can tell Erik Pieters is the man we’re really after.
I thought Jonas looked less effective without Enrique during last weekend’s game. Raylor tried his best in an unfamiliar position but Enrique was also Jonas’s ‘foil’ for forward movement up the left and the two had a good understanding on the pitch. I would hope Jonas could reach a similar understanding with someone like Pieters.
Admittedly I’m only basing this on one game but I thought the ‘glaring holes’ were mainly where we thought they’d be: namely a left-back and a decent quality striker. I think we missed the creativeness of a Ben Arfa sort of player too, although I’m worried about Benny at the moment. Has he just been extremely unlucky or did his double leg break cause more long-term damage than we’re being told?
I hope not.
Convinced we’ll end up with none of the supposed “big Money” signings mentioned for LB or CF & end up with loanees!!