Bargain hunting for top strikers won’t work Derek
Posted on September 3rd, 2011 | 27 Comments |
“Now that the transfer window has closed, we have had some time to reflect on the business we have conducted over the summer.
“Our aim was to secure young players who represented value for money and could add real strength to the squad. The majority of our transfer dealings were completed in the early part of the window and we feel we have signed some players of exceptional quality. Yohan Cabaye, Sylvain Marveaux, Mehdi Abeid, Demba Ba and Gabriel Obertan were all brought in early and we have seen these players settle quickly into the squad and perform well on the pitch.
“Earlier this week we were delighted to sign Davide Santon from Inter Milan to fill our left-back position after the departure of Jose Enrique. Davide is an excellent young prospect and we’re sure he’ll be another superb addition to the squad. We also welcomed young goalkeeper Rob Elliot from Charlton Athletic who will help us retain healthy competition for that position after loaning out Fraser Forster to Celtic.
“Of course we had also hoped to secure a further striker in the window, in addition to Demba Ba. Work to bring a striker into the club began early in the summer. Negotiations were complex and protracted and unfortunately it was disappointing that ultimately we could not secure our priority target.
“Whilst we did turn our attention to alternative prospects in the latter stages of the window, we have a very clear transfer policy and will not make knee-jerk decisions at the last-minute which are not in the best interests of the club. We understand that supporters will feel frustrated that we did not sign another striker during the window, but it was not for lack of trying that we did not bring our final target in.”
While it is undoubtedly a good thing that the club have recruited five new first team players of quality (and a promising younster in Mehdi Abeid), Llambias of course omits to mention that the club have also lost four key members of the team, if you include Andy Carroll from the end of the last window. They included our captain (Kevin Nolan), the top two highest goalscorers from the two preceeding seasons (Carroll and Nolan) as well as our last two players of the season (jose Enrique and Joey Barton), so that’s some replacing that needs to be done for a start. Even in the fairly unlikely event that our new signings provide the highest goalscorers over the next two seasons, and also the two next players of the season, it would still be a relatively small step forward.
On the striker issue in isolation, personally, I think that all the hulaballoo over a the club’s failure to bring in a second striker as a replacement for £35 million Andy Carroll may be somewhat overstated, however Llambias has decided to be defensive on that front, so lets look at it.
Firstly, it was no less than 212 days from the time Andy Carroll was delivered to Anfield in Mike Ashley’s helicopter. This included roughly five months for preparation, and around two to actually “get a player over the line”, a term that manager Alan Pardew has been particularly fond of using over the last window. Though Llambias stated that it was “disappointing that ultimately we could not secure our priority target”, he did not reveal who the priority target was. Amidst the many somewhat questionable stories in the media, representatives of Newcastle, or other clubs (I’m not counting agents for obvious reasons) involved confirmed that approaches had been made for at least three strikers. Alan Pardew confirmed that moves had been made for Kevin Gameiro of Lorient and Mevlüt Erdinç of PSG. Both Pardew and Sochaux confirmed that a move had been made for Sochaux’s Modibo Maiga, including, allegedly, an illegal one under FIFA’s regulations of approaching a player without the permission of his club according to Sochaux. Finally, German club, Freiburg confirmed that they had rejeted a late Newcastle bid for Bundesliga goal machine, Papiss Cissé, who’s phenomenal scoring record in the past two seasons tends to indicate that he may have been the one the club should have been going for all along.
Looking at the evidence, such as it is, it seems to sugggest, to myself anyway, that the club were bidding fairly low on several players in the hope of coming up with a bargain, and negiotiating hard on personal terms if a bid was accepted. Though the club may have had some success with players in other positions, Llambias didn’t seem to grasp that this strategy wouldn’t necessarily work so well with high scoring strikers who are always in demand, either in terms of their current teams wanting to retain them in the light of offers that simply weren’t good enough (Erdinç, Maiga and Cissé), or that of other teams tempting them with better offers in the case of Gameiro, who snubbed Newcastle United’s approach for a choice between Valencia or his eventual destination, Paris St Germain. Quality strikers are indeed a rare commodity at the prices Newcastle United wanted to pay.
If I were a cynic, well, actually, I AM a cynic in Llambias’s case, I could interpret the part of the statement that reads:
“Negotiations were complex and protracted and unfortunately it was disappointing that ultimately we could not secure our priority target.”
as:
“Keep making derisory offers, use prevarication, brinksmanship, possibly, allegedly, approach the player behind the other club’s back and unsettle him to the point where he refuses to play (Modibo Maiga). Then, when the window is almost over and the priority targets have either been withdrawn or sold to other clubs, make a last minute “knee jerk” offer for someone else like Papiss Cisse?”
A previous Newcastle United manager, Kevin Keegan, who had some experience of Ashley’s and Llambias’s negotiating strategies put it even less politely when he said on TV:
“You can’t trust them. They tell you one thing, they mean another. You try and sign a player, I had a ‘phone call for about an hour to buy a player. After I went off the phone, they had another conference call and said “right, we don’t offer two million, we offer one, they’ll reject it.”
Even current manager, Alan Pardew, seems to be showing the first faint signs of frustration at the club’s negotiation policies. When reacting to a question on the club’s failiure to strike a deal with the above mentioned Modibo Maiga, he responded:
“It is difficult for me because I keep doing press conferences and indicating we are getting players and they aren’t coming over the line.
“But it’s only after the window shuts when it becomes a problem.”
Well the transfer window is firmly bolted until January now. Returning to the beginning, ie the title of this piece, while Demba Ba may have been signed on a free, due largely to a question mark over his degenerative knee condition which led to him failing medicals at two other clubs, signing another striker of similar calibre may prove much trickier if the current administration at Newcastle United continue to follow the same transfer policies in the future.
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NUFCBlog Author: workyticket
workyticket has written 1095 articles on this blog.
Not only are we losing players through this kind of dealing but we are almost certainly building a bad reputation too amongst clubs and players.