The transfer window shut last night, as everyone knows. And as everyone knows we didn’t bring in the crucial piece of the jigsaw that would have allowed us to call it a success. This was the window in which we had it all, rumour and counter rumour both.
Brendan clearly wanted to bring in a marquee signing to stamp his own mark on the team.
In that, I feel he’s been astonishingly let down.
This morning, the press said we made an attempt to sign James Morrison at West Brom, but if that’s true what did we spend the rest of the day on? That effort couldn’t have come to anything more complicated than picking up the phone, asking if he was for sale, and being told “no.”
So what did our highly paid CEO spend the rest of his time on? Flicking through the latest edition of Home & Garden, and contemplating an extension to his living room? Did we really try that hard to bring in a player for the manager?
And James Morrison? Why him?
If Brendan likes him okay, but I didn’t think that was the priority area where we needed somebody.
Christie, Armstrong, McGregor and Rogic are all attack minded midfielders. Christie can play wide left. Armstrong’s deputised there. McGregor can play across the middle or out wide. All can fill the “hole” behind a striker.
James Morrison would have bloated an already stuffed area.
Would he have improved our options? Of course.
I trust Brendan’s judgement, but I would have been looking in a different area for a player.
But I thought the key problem was finding a ball winning player.
There were rumours of attacking footballers all the way through the window, but the really meaty stories were the ones about us finding a midfield anchor, a hard man, someone who could protect a defence. That position remains unfilled, and when we come against the best teams in the Champions League that is going to hurt.
I was asked last night if I believe Brendan is in charge of transfer policy.
Of course I do.
None of our signings fits the “Project Profile.” Morrison himself wouldn’t have. They are all top players, and although a couple of them have re-sale value that’s not what they were purchased for. For the first time in ages I see a manager bringing in what he needs, not what crumbs someone else has decided he should have. Furthermore, there’s one factor that unites most of them, and it extends to the players he likes in the team itself.
I’ll talk about that later today.
But as myself and others have pointed out, over and over again, Brendan can only accomplish so much.
He most definitely runs the show but that doesn’t extend, unfortunately, to negotiating the deals. That job rests somewhere else.
The thing that eats me is that I actually understand the Strategy, and why we have it. We are a big club in a small pond, and the obscenity of the £1 billion spend in England is made more acute when you see how many players have gone out on loan after costing tens of millions in the first place. There’s no logic to what’s happening down there; some clubs are spending money, it seems to me, simply because they have it, without a strategic thought.
I mean, how many of these guys are even properly scouted? So many are signed every year that you wonder, sometimes, if English clubs are so scared of looking like they missed out on somebody that they sign every player who shows a modicum of skill.
For a while I’d have said we had the same problem. That has undoubtedly cost us, in more than just financial terms, over the past few years.
So as I said, I do get, in part, the reason for the Strategy existing. I just think that when the money is there – as it clearly is – that we should have pushed out the boat a little, and I say that fully aware that there’s no signing we could have made that would have improved our chances of getting out of this Group of Death we are in (and which I wanted us in!)
But in terms of what we have done, I’m actually very happy.
Brendan has got some of his men, and I have been impressed with each and every one of the signings thus far.
If expectations hadn’t been so high for the midfielder I think most of us would be very, very pleased with what we’ve got here, and I understand that building a team is a process rather than a one-off splurge.
We needed at least one signing at central defence. Kolo Toure, available on a free, was a marvellous piece of business. He looks solid, and stable. The right back problem also looks resolved now, and with an experienced international. We needed a second, experienced keeper to challenge Craig Gordon, about whom doubts have swirled for a while. We required a better striker than the dross we brought in towards the end of last season, Cole and Kazim Richards. We delivered in spades. We needed that Nakamura type talent who can open a defence with a mazy run or a killer pass. In Sinclair – a player of such obvious quality I am still kind of flabbergasted that we got him without having to re-mortgage the stadium – we have him.
Some problems have been fixed. Others remain.
But it’s clear that we’re stronger than we were before Brendan arrived, and all this is to say nothing for the way he’s brought certain players who were already here on in leaps and bounds. We’ve also had two of our contractual issues resolved with James Forrest and Tom Rogic signing new deals; you watch these two in the team of late and you can see they are better off for it. The pressure has lifted. They are back to playing football again.
Could we have done more? Oh Hell yes, we could. We should have done more. But as far as our domestic preparations go we’re in better shape than we have been in years, and next up is a chance to put clear blue water between ourselves and a certain other club the media never tires of telling us can “rival” our own. Not in this lifetime.
This has been a successful window. A modest success, but a success nonetheless, and when you consider we’ve brought these guys in without losing a single high profile first team player you get some sense of just how much things have changed at Parkhead.
I am frustrated, but only because we didn’t reach higher.
But we’ve not been in this good a shape for years.
In Brendan we most definitely trust.