In our case though it often seems to be that we get linked with players that we have had on the books in the past and, sadly far too often, those players end up being our signings within the transfer windows. A policy that all too often has been proven to have failed.
You would have hoped that when we dropped into the Championship this summer that we would have learned from the mistakes that blighted our last few years in the Premier League. The signings of Andre Ayew and Wilfried Bony for the second time were both massive mistakes and one that the club paid heavily for. They were also signings that screamed too much involvement from the board and not enough involvement from the management team and the scouting network.
We all also accepted that the scouting network left much to be desired and with the appointment of Graham Potter in the summer then we hoped it was the first of the right steps into ensuring that the recruitment policy would be left to the management team to identify the targets.
But with the window a little over a week old we have been linked with Nelson Oliviera and Andy King, two former players and suggests that once again we have just started to see the interference from above coming in – interference that has already cost us dearly on more than one occasion.
We probably shouldn’t be surprised, it has already started to be seen that there are leaks from the club who are questioning the decisions of the manager which is the normal way that these things start (remember Mr Laudrup anyone) and now we have links with players who have been here before.
Of course these could be lazy journalism stories (and let’s hope that is the case) but it is back to the sign that we have a manager employed to do a job and potential interference from people above dictating the players that we should be looking at.
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For Ayew and Bony you can also see Marvin Emnes, Fede Bessone, Tom Carroll and other examples of players who have returned to the club and took us from a side that was established in the Premier League side to one that completely lost its way and should be using this time now to rebuild under a manager with big potential. But a manager who must be left to make his own decisions.
I have nothing against either of the two players linked but let us hope for our sakes that both are links that go nowhere because we should be looking to the future rather than players from the past which will probably only lead to us repeating the mistakes of the past.
Let the manager manage and identify within his team his own targets, not force our limited football knowledge onto him.
Pray for lazy journalism.
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