Owzat wrote:Calum wrote:You're relying on Kuyt and Babel to score goals when Torres isn't playing? They struggled there last season and I don't see any reason to think differently this season. Jovanovic is unproven and we'll have to wait and see.
Anybody should be able to see we're light up front and overloaded in midfield. We sold Crouch, Bellamy and Keane. Who were the replacements? Hardly in the same league, are they? I would rather put Cole up front than the names mentioned, but we shouldn't be in that situation if a new striker had been signed.
re Kuyt and Babel, well the whole team struggled so putting their form down to simply not being good enough is harsh since they were in a team with no Alonso, two DMs and not a lot of players performing. Gerrard had a relatively poor season, that played as big a part as any lack of contribution from Kuyt and to a lesser degree Babel.
And you're 'singling out' Kuyt and Babel when N'Gog was the one covering Torres. Below are periods where N'Gog played most of the games, only including the games where he did play 65+ mins even if the period contains more games than results are quoted for.
09/11/09-29/11/09 : N'GOG - P4 W2 D2 L0 (2 goals)
13/12/09-02/01/10 : TORRES - P5 W1 D2 L2 (1 goal)
13/01/10-18/02/10 : N'GOG - P7 W4 D1 L2 (1 goal)
28/02/10-08/04/10 : TORRES - P10 W5 D1 L4 (10 goals)
11/04/10-22/04/10 : N'GOG - P3 W1 D1 L1 (1 goal)
What does that prove? Firstly that N'Gog was more the cover when Torres wasn't playing not Babel/Kuyt. Secondly that regardless who was up top the results were still poor so the TEAM didn't play well, it wasn't down to the striker alone, since even Torres scoring 10 goals in 10 games saw us lose 40% of our games - all away - Wigan, Lille, Man Utd and Benfica, Torres scored once in those four games
And yes, duh, we are "light up front", but when Rafa went to the one up front formation it rather restricted his options. Torres plays better up front on his own, this isn't condusive to having more than one quality striker. He threw £20.3m at a striker who clearly was too old and there were some reservations about his ability too, and when he went down that road and made that mistake it more or less ended our hopes of bringing someone in.
I'm not sure I want Woy to go shopping for a striker, I dread to think who we'd end up with.
Personally id sell Kuyt, Babel Nemteh and Ngog
Then Bring in Romelu Lakaku and Connor Wickham
I wouldnt worry about getting rid of 4 players and only bringing in 2 because i think roy will stick 2 the 1 up front anyway plus Nemeth didnt even feature least season
Wed be slashing the wage bill, wed recoup more money then we would need 2 spend on them which would free up some cheddar 4 other areas and wed be adding another homegrown player 2 the squad. Both r young and imho better. Plus they both r good target men aswell as being technically sound
in charge we aint got the money. Another set of f(cking fantasists, the internet is full of em unfortunately. 
