Quote Originally Posted by lardy View Post
But who, that we could have realistically signed, would have made a definite difference? We wouldn't get someone as good as Mitrovic, and he wasn't enough for Fulham.

This is a bit offtopic, but people overestimate what's needed to stay up. You don't need to be better than three other teams, you just need to get more points than them. It's actually unusual for a team to go down simply because they are bad - Huddersfield were an example of a team being plain crap this season but even they had survived in 15th the season before. Most seasons, every club who get relegated could say "if only we had just had...".

You can pick up points by having a better team, of course, but there are other ways. Burnley qualified for Europe just by having a strong defence and being dogged.

Our failure went deeper than just not scoring enough goals. We had too many games where we weren't creative enough and seemed happy to just snatch a few shots here and there, until the attitude changed a bit around February. It's really asking a lot to put a striker in a team like that and expect him to come up with goals.
The right striker could have seen a different attitude through the first half of the season and might even have provided a morale booster that would have seen us having a far shorter wait for our first win. That two months plus waiting for our first victory is what relegated us because it meant Brighton (who were a worse team than us for the large majority of 18/19) to build up a big enough buffer to keep us at bay.

We went into the summer transfer window of 2018 with all of the talk about us needing a new striker and we went into the summer window this year saying the same thing. To come out of both of them without our main target will reflect very badly on the club at a time when we had the financial resources to push the boat out to an extent that we're not going to be able to do again if we do not go up this season.