Ellis H

Van Dijk on the scrap heap and his “replacement” goes off injured. Lovely.

Bournemouth have signed a young forward who scored 22 in 30 in Ligue 2.

Van Dick being an utter liability this season would be glorious.

A relevant and realistic example is Bournemouth signing Kerkez, Zabarnyi and Huijsen for completely normal fees and affordable wages then they became 3 of the best defenders in the world within 2 years. Players like that exist in the gap between perfect and not good enough.

Ah so you’re deliberately being obtuse. Ok.

So what do we do? Keep trying and failing to sign perfect players and have a tiny squad? This is the second summer window in a row Howe has admitted to struggling to sign players because they aren’t exactly what he wants, despite him saying a few months ago the squad is far too small.

Or not sign them, as it’s turning out.

It isn’t all or nothing though. There’ll be a large pool of players between “perfect” and “not good enough”.

Can’t help but notice he mentioned wanting “the right player” about 3 times in that press conference when asked about our lack of transfer activity.

Surely we’d have had some leaked info from his side if Isak had a leg to stand on here? We all know about Wissa’s alleged agreement for example.

Just sounds a bit like the players have been consulted and want him gone? Depends what he means by “a long time ago” though.

PSR, the market, Mitchell, couldn’t get the “right” player etc. As an aside, it definitely feels like there was a lot more interviews from him last summer. This summer it’s just match based ones.

We weren’t desperate then.

We’re direct rivals, he’ll not be coming here for free. They’ll be gagging to take the piss and see how desperate we are.

They’ll nearly triple their money if it’s £80 million. We can never moan about others bailing out the big teams if we do this. As for us, fail to prepare, prepare to fail. The kind of amateur shite I thought we’d left in the past.

We’ve spent the whole summer targeting players we were after before Mitchell got here so it’s only fair to assume he either did nowt in terms of scouting etc or Howe has rejected every single target he found, either because they aren’t the “right” player or through pure stubbornness. The first option seems very unlikely since 90% of his job was recruitment and the second option is extremely worrying as it’s a huge part of why this summer has been such a fucking mess. If we’re going into every transfer window trying to sign perfect players we’ll be in massive trouble.

Save the money and give Park Seung-soo the minutes instead.

One positive is we’ve only wasted a week on this one. We’re getting quicker.

It feels extremely unrealistic that Mitchell wouldn’t have found at least a few new first team level targets in the last year given it’s a big part of his job (“90% recruitment”) and with how unhappy he was with the process last summer. Seeing how this window has gone, I wouldn’t be surprised if he left because Howe didn’t want his input and only wanted the players on his own list. No doubt we’ll be hearing his side of it soon enough.

"Without going into the individual situation here, we've tried to sign several players,” Howe admitted when asked about putting sole focus on signing one player in Guehi. “It's never been about one player. It can never be about one player, because as soon as you're in that position, then your negotiation strength is over.“ "So, no, we've tried for several targets, but it still has to be the right player though. And there isn't an unlimited number of players. It's not like you can, well, we'll just go on to the next one, the next one, the next one. Because then the quality dilutes and then you have to question whether you're doing the right thing for the long-term future of the club. "There isn't a bottomless pit of money. We're not able to spend that way. Everything that we do has a long-term consequence. So you've got to be very sure whatever you do is right for the long-term future and short-term future of the club.” When asked what the ‘right player’ is for Newcastle, Howe added: “The right player is multi-factored, really. “It's the right age, the right deal as in transfer fee, the right wages, then the right player to actually come into your squad, the right positional need. “There's loads of things. If one of those things is not right, especially financially for us, it puts us in a difficult situation." Thats from last summer and it explains why we’ve got a (very) shortlist of targets. He needs to be asked whether he trusts his scouts or not tbh.

It’s just bad timing to be claiming PSR is holding us back then we make a massive breakthrough on a very expensive signing a few hours later. Never mind though. Move on.

“PSR issues” excuse out the window then. You should have just listened to Howe.