The list of concerns and issues is too long and last night was poor again. QPR are not a good side. Although it's a point, it was a flat performance lacking any kind of creativity.
EMC £4.5mil
Kitching £4.5mil
BTA £2.5m
£11.5million. EMC money spent on a player for a position which has a superior option, a CB showing no signs of being close to that value and a forward who's only attribute is his athleticism. Couple that with signings like Torp at £1-2mil, Rudoni at £4-5mil who are ok championship players at best and we have wasted the incoming transfer money from the big sales (on current showing). We would have been better incrementally adding to the squad over a period of years and supplementing with quality loans with the potential to buy, i.e Gyokeres, Sheaf and so on. The strategy looks incredibly ill considered and reckless and it's landed us in this position where we cannot move in the market unless players move on, or Gyokeres is sold. We can only hope that this is one huge blip.
If we had genuine aspirations to continually make the playoffs and even gain promotion, the players named, amongst those retained and who still feature heavily (Allen, Bidwell, Da Silva and so on) should have be judged as not at that level. The squad may yet and hopefully will click. The marketing around the club has been a commercial success but nobody in their right mind at the club must genuinely believe that with the players named above, we could be challenging with Leeds, Burnley, Leicester, Southampton and so on. Tapping into the momentum of the club was understandable but being so reckless on current showing with both the marketing and player transfers looks to have completely killed that upward trajectory.
The performance last night is worrying again, the gap between Sheaf and the front two is alarming and glaringly obvious. The O'Hare/Palmer link up has gone and for whatever reason that is how we are now setting up to play. The forwards have very little to no service and when they finally get the ball, the quality is severely lacking. We go through spells of trying the play through the middle and losing it, then revert back to long switched passes from a CB to forwards that refuse to engage with the oppositions center backs and go through that cycle again and again.
There is no better manager for us that Robins based on his achievements to date and what he has dealt with. The position he dragged us up from was far more challenging than the task at hand now. He is absolutely right to temper expectations based on what we have purchased and however hard that is for fans to hear, it is the harsh reality regardless of the figures spent. His job is to stabilise and find mid-table form for us as quickly as possible.
We’re in the best position we’ve been in years
