AjaxAndy wrote: ↑Mon Dec 02, 2024 4:36 pm
If he's wrong you can't be spending £25m on a player that's not fit for purpose though. We could have just kept Simms and it would have had at worst the same level of impact without committing £25m to a completely unsuitable player.
I genuinely believe Simms, as little as I rated him, would have had the same or better impact.
We paid nothing in the first season (because we had nothing) for what on paper was a Serie A level striker. We've not used him, and when we have it's certainly not been to his (perhaps limited) strengths, which is concerning.
I understand why the club did it, but I'm not defending them past the fact we had no money or option otherwise. We can't forget what it would have been like had we not signed a striker. That wasn't ever an option. Simms going ok wasn't palatable to the vast majority, and has this season reverted to an underperforming (per xG) 1 in 4 championship bench-warming striker, so it's probably moot.
The PSR problem was avoided though, and we got in a striker that at the time appeased the fans.
Beto could have been seen by the club as a bit of risk-free back up, suck it and see, he could either adapt to our style, or we to his. Neither have happened though (excepting the first half hour of the last game) which is also a concern.
We might lose a bit on him, but there will be clubs out there who will get something out of him like Udinese did if he suits their style of play. They'll pay a fair chunk.
On Thelwell, from what anyone can tell, it doesn't appear that he's done much beyond the wheeler-dealer and day to day org structure management. On the technical side who really knows, but it doesn't look like we are aiming to play his preferred 3 5 2 formation that he wrote his book on, even if our current squad is probably best suited to playing that formation than most others.
From the outside it all still appears a bit disorganised and dysfunctional.