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Bournemouth (especially) and Watford spend an absolute fortune on players. Watford also have a small army of scouts in Europe from their links with Udinese and formerly Granada. I wanted us to sign a striker in August but when the likes of Dominic Solanke cost £19m (to Bournemouth) it is always going to be hard to compete. The club wasn't really ready at the time as evidenced by our valuation of Jefferson Lerma and Bournemouth's.
Rondon and Tosun for starters.
Criteria:
1) Scored a minimum of 10 goals in a season
2) Young - ideally 22/23
3) Had international experience
4) Very keen and hardworking
5) British
6) Knows Warnock's system
7) Great header of the ball
8) Novel line in 'taches
Simples
Rondon went to Newcastle, he wasn't going to choose Newcastle over us. Tosun started the season at Everton, and they signed him for £27m 6 months before. The chances of them ever coming here were sod all. I'm pretty sure they fail almost all of your criteria too. 1, 2, 5 and 6 certainly.
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.
Yes the right striker could have, and speaking of Brighton, they've survived two seasons because they had Glenn Murray doing that for them. But to go back to where this originally started, we're talking about this as football fans. Is spending an enormous amount on a striker good business sense? Or rather, is not buying one bad business sense?
Bearing in mind that we would have stayed up had we not had a couple of games with terrible refereeing decisions and a bit of luck somewhere else.
OK, so why would you change tactic last season?
Realistically, for £20m who would you have got, especially within our wage structure? I don't think we could have got anyone that was a guarantee, especially in our system. I would have spent money on a striker but I don't think it was a guarantee of survival by any measure.
People are suggesting that a decent striker would have kept us up. I admit I only saw all of the home games but I am not that aware that we had very many near misses so not even a decent striker would have made that much difference. True a decent striker can convert his own chances but the very few who can are totally out of our price range. We were a Championship team playing in the Premier League and the Championship is our true level as matters stand.
I think there were far too many things that we can point to as reasons for our relegation.
Number one for me would be the whole structure of our club doesn't give a little underdog club like us any realistic chance of gaining an advantage.
I'm still scratching my head a bit as to how we got promoted in the first place.
Neil Warnock performed absolute miracles to get us promoted and I suspect that 80% of it was down to the characters and leadership he assembled in our squad.
However there was a huge gulf between us and the majority of teams we played last season.
To compete with that you've got to be ahead of the game when it comes to your scouting system, academy, recruitment and everything else behind the scenes.
I overlooked this for the first couple of seasons Warnock was at the helm and was able to say "we are where we are" but as time is going on I see nothing to suggest we are moving forward at all as a club!
We still have no scouting system, we still have no head of recruitment or sporting director. We just have Choo and Dalman wandering about in the dark without a torch!
We are surely far more financially stable than Swasnea at the moment yet have a look at their backroom appointments this summer!
Once again we are 30 years behind in the way we operate as a club.
The wages argument is a fair one and although I want to see us bring a quality striker in, I wouldn't want to see us abandon our wage structure until we are in more of a position where we could sustain the higher costs (i.e. at least one season of survival in the Premier League).
Therefore, the task we have is to find strikers good enough to be successful in our first team at quite high transfer fees who will accept reasonable wages by the standards of the Premier League/Championship.
To my mind, that leaves three options. Firstly, we can look for proven strikers who are coming to the ends of their career. Glenn Murray was mentioned earlier in the summer and I would have thought we could have afforded his transfer fee - he might well have wanted a wage that would have broken our structure, but I'm sure there are plenty of established strikers out there who would agree, at this late stage of their careers, to something we could afford.
Secondly, you could buy on promise alone. When it comes to this approach, the Andreas Cornelius experience looms large, but should it do so really? Cornelius has recovered from what must have been a traumatic experience at Cardiff and made a decent, if not brilliant, career for himself since leaving s. Clubs that have played at a higher level than us for all bar one season since he left us have signed him and, at twenty six with, hopefully, the best years of his career in front of him, he could still end up with fifty caps for a good Danish team.
Cornelius was at the top end of the scale in terms of cost. I'm sure there are promising young strikers out there who are good enough to get into our first team who can be bought in for costs that fall within our current budget.
Thirdly, there's the loan market. This isn't an option I'd favour because, to get the quality of player we need, you end up paying a very high price for someone who is not really your player - I also think there could be issues with things like motivation when it comes to long term loans.
Given what I'm always saying about young players, you won't be surprised to hear that I favour the second of the three options. However, leaving aside what happened with Cornelius, it strikes me that this is not a route that the club favours at the moment - I think this is primarily down to our manager, but I might be wrong there.
We really need to identify what we are and what we want to be and start acting accordingly. At present we come over as being an aspiring Premier League club with a League One outlook in many facets of the game. Youth development is obviously not working because we never develop our young players enough for them to be considered for the first team except in games that are ranked less important for some reason and, although I say this with the knowledge that there is still time for us to come through with signings which will completely change the outlook for the new season, our recruitment system in terms of personnel and policy will really need to be seriously looked at if we do not get the sort of striker we are crying out for in for a second consecutive summer.