DonnieAndMooie wrote:
We replaced the likes of Darling, Twine and Parrot with Oyegoke, Grant and Dennis.
I agree with a lot of what you said, but I don't quite agree with this. I understand the frustrations with recruitment and in hindsight we made a hell of a lot of mistakes. But I think it is slightly dishonest to make those direct comparisions.
The Twine replacement was a big miss, but that was always difficult having gone from Gilbey to Fraser to Twine. We hoped it would be Grant. Let's not forget Twine only had 6 months experience in L1 having previously been shipped out on loan to L2, hardly guaranteed success or a clear proven track record.
We replaced Darling with Tucker - somebody highly sought after with 100 games at this level and cost us a reported £300k
We replaced KKH with Oyegoke - one Premier League youth England international for another Premier League youth international
We replaced Parrott with Barry - one highly rated Premier League Ireland international for one highly rated Premier League, former Barcelona England youth international.
Now did the work? Hell no. But most of us felt at the time they were pretty good replacements
I was exaggerating a point to prove a point. That point being that we had really good players, sold them and then bought rubbish players.