Slightly confused why you would post this on here as you attempted to ridicule the forum during the podcast. Anyway I have a few points.
You say it wasn’t Doug King and Austin who prevented loan signings and the signing of ‘over 30’s’ as you put it. You say it’s just conjecture made up on twitter and sky blues talk.
Well the facts are we did not loan a player this summer, the first time since 2007 (we then loaned Jordan Henderson and Lee Sawyer in January 2008). Seems strange that a manager who has loaned players every season in his 7 years at the club would decide not to this year.
When asked why the club had not utilised the loan market for the first time in 20 years, Mark Robins stated - ‘It shows the strategy of the club more than anything. There are some really good loans out there, that’s clear.’
Regardless, I have no doubt we’ll do a U-turn on that strategy in January, which is surprising as King never does a U-turn on his decisions…
We also failed to sign a player over the age of 25. To me that again seems like a specific recruitment strategy. We aimed to sign young players whom we can sell on for profit. A strategy that has left us inexperienced and naive. I think everybody but King believes experienced players throughout our spine would improve the likes of Thomas, Eccles alongside them.
You say it’s laughable that King is referred to as an egomaniac. This is a man who during our play off push, joined in a lap of honour and sang to his own song whilst the players who had actually contributed to our season looked on. It is worth noting that King contributed absolutely nothing to that season. Unless you believe it was his crucial funding that got the important transfer of Sean Maguire over the line that January. Still, he lapped up the adoration ahead of Victor Gyokeres, Gus Hamer et al. This was a sign of things to come as we all know.
Two recent quotes from King are very interesting to me. One of which is him stating that the players are the fittest they’d ever been and ‘premier league fit’. Interesting that 2 weeks later he would then appoint Chris Jones, Lampard’s trusted fitness expert with years of premier league experience as a fitness coach.
The second is this - ‘Everyone is obsessed with the midfield and obviously there has been a few injuries there but we have high quality in there. I mean, how many midfielders do we want? We have the four that we know about (Eccles, Sheaf, Torp, Rudoni), we have Kai Andrews, Jamie Allen, had Kasey Palmer... We have Joel (Latibeaudiere) who can play in there. Maybe we should have nine or ten’. I will return to this quote following the transfer window when I have no doubt King will do yet another U’turn and sign a central midfielder.
A final thing. You say we needed to ‘shithouse a draw’ to make the playoffs in league 2. That is simply not true. Had we lost that game we would have still made the play offs.
