Post
by Long Time Lurker » Thu Aug 09, 2018 7:06 pm
Danger, Danger
Long post
The Window
At the outset the club mantra was quality not quantity.
We kicked things off with an early £25m bid for Dawson and Jay Rod.
We spent what seemed like an eternity buggering about over these two.
In the final few days we appeared to change tact and thankfully move on.
We eventually signed Gibson and Vydra for £26m, along with Hart at £3.5m.
Incoming Thoughts
I'm very happy with our three new players.
Gibson and Vydra tick a lot more boxes than Dawson and Jay Rod. They are arguably better, both have development potential and they are younger. Instead of looking at a financial loss over their time with us we can now expect a financial gain in terms of any re-sale value.
A new goalkeeper wasn't on the cards until Pope suffered his cruel mishap. We did well to quickly respond to this unexpected situation by bringing in Hart. Good move for all parties and I'm looking forward to seeing him return to form.
Recruitment Team - Positives
We did very well to spot that Middlesbrough had brought in a couple of new central defenders, who could pave the way for the departure of Gibson.
After Leeds failed to get a deal over the line for Vydra we did well to recognise an opportunity for us to capitalise on the hard work they had done setting the price and marking him out as a viable target for moving on in this window. The fact that it was Leeds we gazumped was the icing on the cake.
Pulling the Hart rabbit out of the hat was a good move and we worked well with City to structure a deal that surely brought him in line with our salary structure. His arrival plugs a gap and I can see a lot of future advantages to this one. When he returns to form we will have a lot of options to turn a good profit regarding any potential keeper outgoings, without compromising our overall strength in that area.
We drew a prominent line in the sand that marked us out as a club that can get deals done quickly when clubs are willing to meet us on reasonable terms. Our stance on not paying over the odds for players was bolstered.
The shift towards younger players, as opposed to players in their prime, was good to see and it will pay dividends for us.
Recruitment Team - Negatives
An understandable choice regarding our initial two targets. We went in early with a fair offer, but we forgot about past history of dealing with WBA.
We were very slow to respond to the obvious signals regarding the stance of WBA in response to our offer. It seemed like we were struggling to decide whether we should stick or twist for a long time.
Going back in for targets that we were previously interested in could highlight how short our list of possible targets was at the outset of this window. If that is the case we need a longer list for future windows to give us more flexibility so we can adapt to changing circumstances.
We could have used a couple more additions in this window, bringing in a left winger and possibly another centre midfielder would have been nice. The lack of another winger might come back to haunt us.
Once again, the European aspect of our recruitment showed no noticeable improvement.
Conclusion
If the team needs improving we target and bring in new players, introduce new training methods, improve the physical infrastructure, develop the players we have and look for new ways to boost their overall effectiveness. We don't sit around hoping things will improve.
We need to make a more focussed effort to improve our recruitment by doing the same. If that means spending money to employ some specialist European scouts, bringing in extra people to improve and expand our knowledge gathering capacity, developing the staff that we have in our recruitment team, making use of new information gathering systems or networking to develop relationships with contacts that can give us detailed information on players we need to do it.
If we want our recruitment to improve in line with the other areas of the club we need to start investing some more money in it. When you look at the prices players are going for these days adding another million or so a year to the recruitment departments overall budget could pay off with some healthy dividends.
I would rate this window as a 6.5/10. What we have done has been good, but with money in the bank and our attraction point at an all time high we could have done more. We were looking at a 1/10 for effort before the final week kicked in and then we really seemed to step it up a gear.
After the first 80 minutes we were two goals down, despite the hard work that was being done off the ball, and then we scored three goals from well executed set pieces in the final 10 minutes.
