The way you’re going on it’s as though Bradley and Konaté have just had their careers ended.
I highly doubt the club is going to bring in players just for the couple of weeks in January that we might need cover for.
If they do bring in players it’s either because they were part of the long-term plan anyway (like Gakpo, and I can’t remember who else we accelerated our schedule for), or because the injuries to the two of them are far more serious than thought.
You’re acting as though we only have 1 centre-back left.
Different players have different recovery times for their injuries.
Looking at our position in the table , I’d be very pissed if we didn’t reinforce the squad in Jan. It might be someone we’ve been targetting for a while. Or it might be a stop gap.
I’d rather be afraid of what happens next than have some confidence in something like freak injuries being avoided
Just asking for one more reinforcement. I’d love it if it was someone we have been clearly working on for a while. Otherwise , we would need to aim for a stop gap.
The worst thing that can be done is to hope for the best that the guys recover and then the recovery time takes longer than expected. And we end up screwing up the league because of that.
He’s literally our third-choice right-back/left-back. He’s a bonus, not a full-back by trade.
You can’t have it both ways. Right now, with injuries, considering we don’t know how long Bradley/Tsimikas are out since it’s not actually been confirmed anywhere despite your knee-jerking, we still have Robertson, Van Dijk/Quansah/Gomez, and Alexander-Arnold for our backline. It’s not ideal because of the busy December period when we’d want to be spreading out the games among all the players, but buying someone in January will not help that at all. It’s quite easy to see games where we just use Gomez to rotate across the backline, without giving up too much, until we get Tsimikas and Bradley back. If one more gets injured, tough luck. No team is going to come back from that no matter what.
We’ve had this go on over and over again over the years and it’s really bloody annoying. 2 left-backs, 4 centre-backs, and 2 right-backs are more than enough. It’s a squad of a maximum of 25 senior players. That’s one third of the entire squad right there already. It’s just the usual transfer wanking to think we need to buy buy buy.
Diaz was one. Minamino was another. I didnt think Gakpo was though as he was expected to move to Utd in the prior summer or when that didnt happen the winter window, and we stepped in only when they didnt pull the trigger?
I think there’s a player who was quite highly rated by the clubs he was on loan at in previous seasons (although his parent club sold him this past summer) who’s a versatile defender capable of playing across the backline. I believe he hasn’t had a great season thus far so should come cheaper, and would provide great backup for all our defensive positions. Perhaps we should buy him?
Endo can play CB to a decent level (from my recollection).
No need to fully panic when we have 3 regular CBs + Endo left. Having said that… I don’t like that we don’t have ready options in the U21s. I prefer to have one or two options, always at the edge of the first team (for most positions).
IMO some steps should be done to shore up some of our youth recruitment and these brief moments (when we are a bit light) should be given to the youngsters rather than to veterans who will sit most of the time.
And before someone asks: isn’t it risky to rely on youth? The answer is yes, but no more than any transfer. Short-term crisises in depth is how Bradley, Quansah, Bajcetic and even TAA took the big step forward.
We’ll see what happens over the course of the next month. If the team are still well positioned to fight for the title, some strengthening could be done - maybe a chance to push forward a deal that was supposed to happen in the summer, perhaps for a centre back? I wouldn’t expect more than one player coming in in January, though, regardless.
We also have to take the academy and loaned players into account as well - there’s a really interesting group coming through and maybe some of them will be called upon from the next summer.
