Originally Posted by
lardy
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.