by CP Gull » 10 Jun 2017, 11:11
Whilst I understand the need to have been patient through the month of May as we are no longer a club that has the sort of budget to compete with the "big boys" in this League, I too am beginning to get a little frustrated at the lack of progress on the signings front. As it stands, we have a "squad" of just SIX players and we are still "waiting on" decisions from both Moore and Richards - who should have given us an answer by last weekends deadline. Plenty of Managers I can think of who would have moved on from them by now, insisting that what is the point of making an offer with a time limit on it if you are simply going to allow things to drift without insisting on a decision being made. Meanwhile, we are still without a goalkeeper at the club, while others are being signed elsewhere!
The reality is that the players return to pre season training, just two weeks on Wednesday and our first friendly is less than a week after that! To complete the bare minimum of a suitable size squad of 16 players, we need to sign ten players in the next EIGHT weeks although if we are in any way serious about competing at this level, we would realistically need more like 12, but preferably say 14 - in order to make a 20 man squad, a sensible size of squad to be operating with at this level. That is an awful lot of recruiting to be done, in a relatively short space of time. Of course it can be done as we saw what Paul Cox had to do two summers back, when he pretty much built a squad up from a similar position.
But my concern is that we may be about to see a return to those days when we have 10, 15, or more trialists turn up at pre season training - just in the hope that we may unearth a few "rough diamonds" together with a few "squad fillers" prepared to play for peanuts. We should also not forget that most of those "rushed" signings by Cox didn't work out, with perhaps just Smith and Butler, and to a lesser extent Marsh and Hurst, being decent signings but as for the rest (Spiess, Geohaghon, Carmichael, Fenwick, Murombedzi, Bell, Heslop, Lavelle-Moore, Fisher, Fairhurst etc) .... they had all left by the following summer if memory serves me right, most quite a bit sooner! So, as proved to be the case under Cox, that sort of preparation is not ideal, far better to be working with your starting XI (or close to it) as early as you can be in pre season so that you are fully ready for the new League to kick off on the 5th August.
So, over to you Nicho ..... FOURTEEN signings in EIGHT weeks .... and we can all go into the new season feeling that we are ready and better prepared for a more successful season ahead of us than the last two dreadful ones!!!!!!
Whilst I understand the need to have been patient through the month of May as we are no longer a club that has the sort of budget to compete with the "big boys" in this League, I too am beginning to get a little frustrated at the lack of progress on the signings front. As it stands, we have a "squad" of just SIX players and we are still "waiting on" decisions from both Moore and Richards - who should have given us an answer by last weekends deadline. Plenty of Managers I can think of who would have moved on from them by now, insisting that what is the point of making an offer with a time limit on it if you are simply going to allow things to drift without insisting on a decision being made. Meanwhile, we are still without a goalkeeper at the club, while others are being signed elsewhere!
The reality is that the players return to pre season training, just two weeks on Wednesday and our first friendly is less than a week after that! To complete the bare minimum of a suitable size squad of 16 players, we need to sign ten players in the next EIGHT weeks although if we are in any way serious about competing at this level, we would realistically need more like 12, but preferably say 14 - in order to make a 20 man squad, a sensible size of squad to be operating with at this level. That is an awful lot of recruiting to be done, in a relatively short space of time. Of course it can be done as we saw what Paul Cox had to do two summers back, when he pretty much built a squad up from a similar position.
But my concern is that we may be about to see a return to those days when we have 10, 15, or more trialists turn up at pre season training - just in the hope that we may unearth a few "rough diamonds" together with a few "squad fillers" prepared to play for peanuts. We should also not forget that most of those "rushed" signings by Cox didn't work out, with perhaps just Smith and Butler, and to a lesser extent Marsh and Hurst, being decent signings but as for the rest (Spiess, Geohaghon, Carmichael, Fenwick, Murombedzi, Bell, Heslop, Lavelle-Moore, Fisher, Fairhurst etc) .... they had all left by the following summer if memory serves me right, most quite a bit sooner! So, as proved to be the case under Cox, that sort of preparation is not ideal, far better to be working with your starting XI (or close to it) as early as you can be in pre season so that you are fully ready for the new League to kick off on the 5th August.
So, over to you Nicho ..... FOURTEEN signings in EIGHT weeks .... and we can all go into the new season feeling that we are ready and better prepared for a more successful season ahead of us than the last two dreadful ones!!!!!!
