This is a well written post to say exactly why some people are concerned or even worried about what comes next. It doesn’t mean people are panicking, it just means some of us are more worried than others about this.AjaxAndy wrote: ↑Wed Oct 02, 2024 1:17 pm No Branthwaite, no DCL, no Doucoure who we've barely won a game without for 3 years, no Gana, Tarks a year older.
Still no right back, still no back up left back... Yes we will hopefully recruit these but we need soooo many players who knows if we will or what the quality will be.
We will have 12-13 players, and most are kinda crap. Our midfield will literally be Garner and Tim unless I'm forgetting someone.
Trying to firstly bed half a new squad in is really tough, you need them to gel very quickly which is no easy task. Secondly we need to recruit well but stretch the money across many players so either we buy incredibly well or we have big problems.
Yes we finished effectively 12th last season, with a team that consisted of Branthwaite, DCL, Doucoure, Gana and Onana... all of them will be gone at the end of this season other than Onana who already has.
I would be more optimistic if the 12 players we retained were quality and it was just adding depth, but they really aren't. Out of those remaining out only decent players will be Pickford, McNeil and Ndaiye, with Tarks and Mykolenko as ok.
We've seen this year without Branthwaite how much we struggle, well take him and half the team away and it's a very difficult picture.
We may recruit well, we don't usually but maybe we will this time... Only we'll have to wait for Branthwaite to be out the door so unless that happens early it makes things even harder as we rush about trying to finalise deals before the season starts.
It's a bit of a cluster fuck and that's not really a good place to build something successful from, or relatively successful in terms of our recent history.
We keep having conversations about stuff and then polarising different views to make the other posters seem like they’re crazy or unreasonable. That’s why so many of our threads go round in circles.
I think we’ll be ok but I don’t have a crystal ball and the points raised above are all legitimate concerns of varying degrees.
But let’s try and discuss opinions a bit more than dismiss opinions because otherwise all we get is the ping-pong of Dyche In/ Dyche Out or Relegation Battle / Relative Safety and it causes factions and is tediously boring.
