Transfer rumours and speculation to take us through to summer.
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Comments
I must confess at this point that other than a few clips I never actually saw Bobby Moore play and so couldn't comment on whether he really was head and shoulders above all else or whether being the Captain of that particular squad in 66 has created a legend. Even leaving Bobby aside if he can be as good as Rio he will have a career to look forward to.
My own hope is that he is simply not for sale this summer and we splash the cash and really try and become a team he thinks he can win something with. If there was a time to go for it it's now. We had a previous moment when we left the Boleyn but didn't take it, I think this time we will have a good go. The owners demonstrated last season end that they didn't want to walk away after the protests and instead spent and hired, I think they will be aware they are not getting any younger and of they want to be the ones to put us on the map it will be now. We have a good manager a good squad to build upon and a potentially world class player in Declan Rice. Gotta be worth a push.
Would welcome all of those at West Ham.
Arnautovic's value has plummeted since January and we'd be lucky to get our money back on him, and the rest of the squad really aren't the players to attract big money.
Antonio may get £15-18m, but can we afford to let him go? Masuaku may get £10m, but can we replace (and improve on) him for less than that?
Perez may bring in £5-7m, Hernandez £10m, possibly.
I just hope that our transfers in the summer are done with an element of intelligence and long-termism.
We just spent £100m, so £30m is more like a top up on last years business.
Anyway, there will be some players moving on this summer. Rice & Arnie would basically add £100m to the budget.
Personally I would expect around 50m plus sales to be reasonable, sales would be like for like so should we get 20m for Arnie that's what we can replace him with, on top of that the new 50m would pay for two to three reasonable additions, add to this our injured players returning and I feel that squad should be a threat.
In the absence of a real sugar daddy rolling up I think that's about as much as we can hope for and quite reasonable, considering the squad is reasonable.
And frankly that's not enough to keep up with the other mid-size teams looking to push on, IMO.
But you can't buy a cup run.
We have properly competed for 7th, otherwise people wouldn't be moaning that we haven't got there.
We've had some poor performances/results, but also had no luck with decisions.
The last 2 games alone potentially cost us 5 points, which would have left us 3 behind 7th.
If you factor in another very unlucky run of injuries, we are not as badly off as some people seem to think.
The fact is we are closer to 16th than 7th now. We are adrift of the 7th to 10th and are firmly in the 11th to 16th slot. the 11th to 16th slot is the "just enough to survive squad."
There are plenty of other clubs who have had decisions go against them.
We have had one decent season in our last 5 years, the final season at the BG.
I've enjoyed the breakthrough of a couple of young players, I've been impressed with some of the signings (Fab, Diop, Anderson, Yarmo).
I agree with Yeold that you can't really use an injury crisis as an excuse when you've signed Yarmolenko (missed the previous 6 months or so before joining us), Wilshere (missed the previous 100 years before joining us), Nasri (out of football for a year). Particularly as most of our injuries aside from those have been to peripheral figures (IMO).
IMO, the big one was Balbuena.
I saw an interesting stat the other day that puts us in the bottom three for distance covered in games this season. Now this is something that Slav got hammered for when he was here, but it seems to have slipped under the radar under Pellegrini.
I mean, it doesn't seem to matter who's in charge, what players we buy, we just seem to see the same things season after season; injuries (we've been through numerous medical teams and have even moved training grounds but with no obvious improvement), slow starts in games, inconsistent performances during games and over the season as a whole, apparent lethargy from the players.
Even with a manager who has never finished below 7th in his career and a record transfer spend, we are still on course for a bottom half finish, with every chance that we could finish below Crystal Palace and Newcastle. It just feels like there's a culture of indifference and acceptance at the club. Every year the fans seem to say, 'well let's see what happens in the summer' and a collective kicking of the can down the road to actually achieving something as a football club.
We've changed everything else so it must be that we need to get a new tea-lady. :biggrin:
I don't disagree with any of that.
I think, from my perspective at least, that something we haven't really tried as a club since Harry Redknapp left is to stick by a manager for an extended period of time and let them build something. I think that we will never be out of that cycle of 'let's see what happens in the summer' if we continue to either sack the manager, have a massive turnover of players or have huge pressure on the manager.
I really believe that Pellegrini can move this club forward, through embedding the right culture, through his belief in young players, through his style of play, through his calm demeanour, through his winning reputation. In my opinion, completely changing the culture of a club isn't going to be something that a manager can do in 1-2 years, and is something that will often be completely undone by a new manager coming in with different ideas.
We have different owners, different players, different manager, different coaches, different medical staff, different stadium etc. so how and why do we end up with the same "culture"? :hmm: