That’s a fair question, but he does take quite a lot of shots, so surely either he’s taking unnecessary shots, or his shooting just leaves a lot to be desired?
There’s also the second goal we scored against Arsenal where he played Salah in on the counterattack.
I wonder if you’d have the same opinion if you watched Bournemouth games like you would with our games (genuine question). I think the jokes about 10 games hold quite a fair bit of truth, because otherwise it’s just cherry-picked moments in a way. If you watch him a lot more closely you may (and I genuinely don’t know which way it would be) find that he’s a lot less impressive than he seems. Or you may find that he’s a real world-class forward in the making that we have missed.
The Newcastle match showed us how we still need to improve to have more control on a game. Zubimendi brings that and improves us in the immediacy and for the longer haul. I suspect Endo will make way, sooner or later, because Slot doesn’t appear to fancy him too much, and he would then be seventh at best in the pecking order. A core midfield 6 of Zubimendi, Gravenberch and Mac Allister, with Jones, Szoboszlai and Elliott to see plenty of action too, would be about as good as there is in world football. If we can’t sign Zubimendi - and if we are going to it should be mostly tied up before we even get to January, then move on quickly. Baleba looks a real prospect. Maybe Tchouameni, or Stiller, or Wharton, or Ederson… you get the point, there are a number of midfielders who might just fit the bill.
Kerkez looks really good to me too. Already performing at a high level, but with more improvement and peak years to come. I think he could come in to rotate with Robbo over the next year or so, enabling us to get the best of what Andy has left, while in time Kerkez will take over. Tsimikas is a decent back up, but I don’t see him as a long term first choice, and he has had injury problems too. It’s time to be ruthless. Hato from Ajax might be an alternate to consider if there’s an issue with signing Kerkez.
Kerkez, Zubimendi in January. Win the title. Then see what we need to do in summer.
I’m surprised there wasn’t more talk or links with him, but I never watched him regularly, so who knows if he’e even that good, regardless of his numbers.
Interested to see where he goes next, as he will be free.
grab Davies and David at the same time, that would be a coup.
Nunez can fuck off to the continent, he’s not worth the money we paid for him (or Chiesa, for that matter).
We need a CB, and a RB. Trent is off to join Jude in Spain, that’s a no-brainer. Conor needs backup, Robbo’s replacement will need to be sorted in the next 12-18mo as well so we have a plan moving forward. why not Davies?
wonder is Bajcetic will come back from Europe strong enough to take on a role here?
If we could strengthen one position in January to improve our chances of success this season what would it be? Not talking about replacements for possible summer outgoings.
The summer window was far from ideal. Key positions required strengthening, and the weaknesses weren’t addressed.
The team has done really well so far, and we’ve built a small cushion at the top, but that can disappear quickly. It will be interesting to see if there are any signings in January.
Said it should have been done in the summer. You could tell Robbo wasn’t the player he once was and I’ve never been that convinced on Tsimikas. There were even some tenuous links to Kerkez in the summer.
Was always going to need doing sooner than later, no idea why we didn’t use a quiet summer to do it before it became a necessity which is the territory we find ourselves in now.
AS seems to have decided upon giving himself a season to bed-in with the brilliant resources left by Jurgen. We are in a great position at the moment, and yes we are discovering wrinkles that could have been ironed out, but that would have meant trade-offs elsewhere. Squad harmony for instance, has remained in-tact, which has been crucial
Perhaps the conclusion should be that there weren’t any candidates sufficiently convincing who would be worth the hassle trying to get rid of one of Robertson or Tsimikas for? I don’t think we would go into the season with 3 senior left-backs.
I thought I’d easily give my answer to this but it turned out that I’m too influenced by all the injuries we’re having. That said, after some thinking, I decided that I’d still like Endo to be replaced by a suitable defensive midfielder in January because this team is a Gravenberch injury away from reverting to the team that ended the previous season.
Regardless of what happens with The Contract Three, I think that club just have to buy a new left back and a new centre forward next summer. I’d like the club to keep Robertson and Jota, though. Tsimikas has shown a strange knack of getting injured as soon as he hits his best form (which is good enough for a lot of CL sides in my opinion), while Nunez is Nunez (and I hope that Danns will continue where he left off prior to his injury).
Perhaps the club’s view of the market wasn’t strong enough, with their assessment or decisiveness falling short to make a move. Similarly, their evaluation of the squad’s strengths and weaknesses may not have been thorough enough.
I’d argue we’ve been here before with the whole fuss about centre-backs in 2020-21, except that despite what people remember, the options that did move that summer were terrible, with us having actually signed one of those we were reportedly linked to, who ended up barely getting a game for us thanks to injury and other concerns anyway, and eventually being unable to get many games for a Norwich team.
The club’s process has also delivered us relative success, so I don’t think there’s much of a reason to believe that it was that catastrophic a failure. If Tsimikas hadn’t picked up an untimely injury in training, we wouldn’t be talking about this, especially if Bradley hadn’t been injured at the same time too, since Gomez would be able to rotate over to the left.
Tsimikas was also getting quite a fair bit of praise prior to his injury, so despite @rab’s concerns it’s not as though he was terrible.
I think on the contrary that it took injuries to Alisson, Tsimikas, Bradley, Konaté, Elliott, Jota, and Chiesa before we seemed to start dropping points from that, but even then if Kelleher hadn’t made that mistake, or if those rather unlikely finishes hadn’t gone in (Kelleher’s mistake, the own goal yesterday), we would still have dropped only 5 points all season, which I think is rather remarkable.
The defence is a concern, but any team would suffer with 3 injuries across the backline. We’ve seen the whiny twats of the league bleat non-stop over far less, and yet we’ve managed just fine thus far.
