I know I’m going to get pellets for this but I’ll say it anyway:
I said at the time I thought him a bad signing and with the wage budget he soaks up we could have signed another player and kept Max. Someone posted a video of Walker’s goals yesterday on here and Max was there holding off defenders and giving great assists. Don’t know the stats for goals / minute or assists for Max / Wag because there’s no need; Waghorn has done F-All.
It was strange, as I said at the time, that we’d let go of our physical forwards (those with pace / strength Baka, Kasta, Max, players who could hold up or run through a defence, muscle at corners etc. and not replaced them and had no stuntman to step in to Gyok to receive the long balls through the middle.)
Now, for clarity, Baka and Kasta were not good enough. Max was not good enough to be our main threat but a perfectly decent, committed back up who knew our system and didn’t “need time to gel” (which was the excuse for Waghorn for the first few weeks). Also, he would have given us the opportunity to stop having to run Gyok into the ground like a Mijas Donkey.
In short, I said it then and I’ll say it now. We shouldn’t have signed Waghorn, kept the slightly younger Max and used the big difference in wages to sign a couple of other players. A couple of young gambles where we might have got jackpot transfer fees rather than the dead cert that we wouldn’t get a fee for Waghorn.
Wrong player. Wrong age, wrong wage, wrong attributes.
All wrong.
I got laughed at for saying this before but I’ll stand by my thoughts then and now.