25/25: Quansah was OK, but mistakes were creeping into his game towards the end of the previous season. Slot started him in the first game and rightly took him off for the more dominant Konate (a decision which proved instrumental in winning the game) who didn’t put a foot wrong all season.
Konate/Van Dijk turned out to be a league winning pairing. I really don’t understand the logic of claiming that Slot should have broken that up to give a young lad pity minutes.
25/26: Selling Quansah wasn’t the issue. The issue was the failure to get Guehi over the line, or rather allow Palace to leave us with our dicks out. It wasn’t foreseeable that Konate’s form would collapse to level it did, but the expectation was obviously to have Guehi there as an option.
I don’t know what happened with Guehi, but when you’ve had permission from a club to do a medical and had the player in your kit doing loads of media work, it’s reasonable to think it’s done. It’s highly unusual to have a manager let a transfer get that far before having a paddy and pulling the plug.
We were still in the position of having one of our two first-choice CBs entering the last year of his contract and talks apparently at a stalemate, and the other in his mid-30s. The club may have hoped Konate would extend but it had been obvious for a long time Real had been hovering, so why take the chance. You could argue even if Guehi had come in we were still vulnerable to the position we now find ourselves in of being extremely light at the back.
You yourself have expressed a wish that the club would take a more hardline stance on players entering the last two years of their deal, or does that not apply here?
Ironically if Slot had given Quansah more “pity minutes” (I disagree with using that phrase btw) we’d probably now be in a far stronger position with Quansah still at the club and Ndukwe ready to provide cover as we’d have kept an additional ESC spot.
There was definitely room for both in a squad where one guy was entering the last 12 months of his deal and making goo-goo eyes at Madrid, arguably would have been a preferable situation as he was a teenager from a weaker league and could have spent last season gradually finding his feet.
Yes, lots of selective reading…
And you’re as guilty of it as anyone to be fair.
The treatment of Quansah was piss poor, taking him off in that match and subsequent under use of a good player.
He was poor in the first half of the Ipswich match, but hauling him at half time was a poor decision. If Slot mirrored this with other shite first half performance; then I would see consistency .
MacAllister, Konate, Frimpong, the list is long of players who could have been hooked at half time last season. So in my view Quansah was badly managed.
Selling him on foot of Guehi arriving makes no sense either. Quansah was a good cover for right back, which we needed and even if Guehi arrived having him here made sense. Gomez injured, the RB situation, all areas for keeping Quansah at the club. Plus, and this is hindsight…Konate was awful at times.
I know you abhor Slot being incorrectly blamed for stuff, but this one was 100% on him.
Totally disagree with that. There is a limit to how many centre backs you can carry. Four seems to be the right number.
We went into the last season with Van Dijk, Konate, Gomez and Leoni. Had Guehi been completed, we can be relatively sure Gomez would have gone. So I think @rab is right when he says Leoni was the replacement for Quansah, and its incredibly unlucky that the lad did his ACL on his debut.
This season we have Van Dijk, Gomez, Jaquet, Leoni, and Araujo, which is five - but I think the club are basically not counting Gomez at this point.
Again, I disagree. You can’t look at 24/25 as the same thing as 25/26
We won the league in 24/25, and I don’t think there were too many examples of a situation where a player was stinking it out and was easily replaced as there was that first game. It was clear, ruthless management and it won the game.
By 25/26 the season was getting away from Slot, and he was increasingly lost in his own decision making. I don’t think by that point even if he had changes to make (which he often didn’t) he was capable of acting with that degree of decisiveness. Mac Allister should have been hooked at umpteen half times, but that point Slot was a manager falling apart and on route to being sacked.
I’m not ignoring anything. We all know the club could be more proactive with contracts and the like. But that’s a choice they make - I don’t think there is anything careless about it. They aren’t going to give out a huge contract to a fifth centre back when they have four on the books.
Even if they were 100% Konate was off, that’s why they lined up Jaquet.
Just the fact we’ve resorted to loaning Araujo demonstrates to me we fucked up over Quansah. Had he stayed, it wouldn’t have been required and we’d be better off for it.
I hope the lad does well, but his history of brainless decisions and the fact Barca fans are celebrating his departure doesn’t fill me with optimism.
A big reason why Barca fans are celebrating is because La Liga have had them on a very tight leash for a while now, and him moving on means they have space for a new toy.
I know someone who is a massive fan of Uruguayan football and players (formerly of this parish), and even he says we’ve managed to sign the one Uruguayan player he didn’t want
I’m all for carrying an extra defender given Gomez’s issues but Quansah clearly wasn’t fancied by Slot. Yes we could have kept him and in hindsight with the Leoni and Bradley injuries he’d have played more than expected.
But can we keep players like that around just in case? Is he the desirable option now without a season starting in the Bundesliga? No one could have predicted Slot would be gone this summer and Quansah would get a chance.
In hindsight it’s an obvious decision to have kept him around. At the time it looked like he was fifth choice CB and third choice RB but also a bankable asset we could bring back in a couple years if we wanted.
I can see it both ways but you have to judge the decision on when it was made and at that point he looked dispensable, even more so had we got Guehi over the line as hoped. On reflection with the manager going, losing out on Guehi and the injuries it looks worse by the week.
It’s a discussion about the rumours that Arsenal are in for Quansah, and the events that lead to that even being something that’s on the cards for them to do.
