When he confronted the media yesterday for his press conference prior to playing Sevco on Thursday night, Zoran Zekic, the manager of Croatian club Osijek lamented the loss of their star player, their goal-scorer Gabrijel Boban.
“Luck has deserted us,” he said. But every manager knows that luck can do that, and so he took a moment to consider what more he and his club could have done to limit the damage. “ With Eros Grezda a long-term injury it leaves us very light up front and we are relying on Ezekiel Henty to help us out as a striker. It’s a lesson to us. We should have moved quicker to strengthen up front, especially with European football these days.”
And that’s about as honest an assessment as you’ll get. Something tells me that he and his club will learn from this. Something tells me they won’t make the same mistake again. That all clubs were willing to take such lessons on board. That ours was.
I am not talking here about Dembele, although I could be. He spent long stretches of last season on the treatment table, and so did Leigh Griffiths. Yes, we have a very good striker up front on whom we can rely, but we now know too that he isn’t 100% fit and didn’t train until Monday.
If he, too, had been ruled out our problems would have exponentially increased.
This is not an ideal situation. Far from it. But combined with our troubles at the back, it shows once more how shockingly inept we are at this deadline-beating signing lark. It shows how some of the people at this club of ours are willing to risk Champions League qualification. Had Edouard been injured, and all three of our strikers out, oh what trouble we’d have been in … and we’ll never know if there was a Plan B for that eventuality, but I doubt it.
This should not be an issue.
The manager has identified a replacement for Roberts as one of his priorities; an wide player capable of scoring goals could double as a striker in a pinch as there are options within the squad if Edouard had not made it. Sinclair and Forrest can both play through the middle, but you would not bet £40 million on either, which is what we’d have had to do.
As it is, we’re betting it on a not-quite-fit Mikael Lustig instead, a player almost every one of us thinks needs to be replaced with better quality in the here and now.
The horrible truth of our forward line predicament is that Dembele will struggle to be fit for Athens. So will Griffiths. So I guess we better pray that nothing happens to Odsonne Edouard. But on top of that, we remains appallingly lax in other areas too and so we better pray nothing happens to Kieran Tierney. If Simunovic gets more than a one game ban we better pray nothing happens to Kristofer Ajer. The risk we are taking is extraordinary. Either our much vaunted scouting system has failed to identify the players we want in advance – which suggests a shocking lack of preparedness – or there is a reluctance to close the deals in a timely manner.
And we all know what that suggests.
The manager of a club which is a fraction of our size has taken a lesson from an injury crisis which we never, ever seem to learn and he’s done so before that crisis results in harm. What’s it going to take before we do the same? Actual harm? We have become complacent, and it’s because this gamble has worked two years in a row … it’s almost as if our club enjoys tempting fate, as if those running it enjoy this lottery, year on year.
If we go out it won’t be down to bad luck … teams make their own luck by preparing for the bad.
Edouard aside, our total lack of transfer activity has left us in vulnerable.
If this gamble fails, someone will have to answer for it.