sainthelens said:
I said earlier in the week that I would totally be on board with a cheeky £1m bid (or a loan) to bring Rodon back. I think that he and Cabango together would fix our powder puff defending which has blighted a huge portion of our season.
I would love to see Piroe stay but I have to be realistic - the moneyballers will look at his stats including his phenomenal accuracy and chance conversion rates combined with his age and nationality (no issues with AFCON for example) and will be creaming all over him. Our bargaining position is pretty strong but that only matters if the people doing the bargaining are strong, if he goes for less than £25m then the other team are getting a steal. Anything less than £20m is daylight robbery - in either case if we sell him we absolutely need to invest every penny of it back into the side.
As said above at least one more ball playing centre half is needed but its not the only position that needs work. If we do end up selling Piroe then we need to bring in another forward - Congreve showed good promise today but arguably is one who might fall into the "could do with a season on loan for first team experience" category.
As mentioned earlier in the thread too I wouldn't be super opposed to seeing Paterson being sold, he is often one who drifts in and out of games and his contribution the last ten games or so of the season has been very low. If we got £3-5m for him that would be astounding business for a free transfer.
That brings me to our wingbacks which are vital to the way that RM wants to play. I am hugely surprised that we didn't give Ogbeta more game time after two very positive performances from him earlier in the season. Wolf has done well but he isn't our player and so we have to look at the long term, Manning and Ogbeta have our left wingback position covered - its our right side that needs addressing. Christie is a bit of an enigma, sometimes he seems to have the attacking nous of Korey Smith (eg none) and other times he plays with real threat and there seems to be no in between. What is more concerning is the total lack at the moment of a second option at right wingback which is a real problem that does need fixing even if we do resign Christie on a free.
If we sign Allen (which I would absolutely not be opposed to) then that means in my eyes that we are prepared to sell either Downes or Grimes in the summer. Of the two I would prefer to lose Grimes - for every game he has where he looks like the player we always wanted him to be he has two or three where he regresses back to "Mr Safe" and just doesn't seem to give us any real impetus which is critical in dictating the tempo for the rest of the team.
Goalkeeper is another tough one - I know that RM brought in Fisher and that he is his man but I feel that he is simply a more experienced but worse version of Benda. Taking Benda out of the team when his confidence was shot and then sending him on loan to get that confidence back was the right move - but now we need to look to him in my opinion for the future. If he leans when he can try to be clever and when to just get rid then he is a better version of Fisher with superior shot stopping, distribution and ability to claim crosses and command his box (being like 6ft 7in certainly helps there).
