Nickyboy wrote:Mase wrote:There’s nothing we can do about this now.
The whole deal was weird - no buy back or sell on, that’s out of character for City. He asked to go out on loan and was told by Pep he’d have to go properly.
It’s on Pep. We can keep beating ourselves up about it but it’s on Pep.
We talk about how well ran the club is, and obviously it is in a lot of aspects, but how we’ve allowed Palmer to leave because the manager spat his dummy out and how we’ve allowed this squad to age to the point we’re not able to keep up with teams anymore is worrying.
At some point someone should have stepped in and said it doesn’t matter if you like a small squad, we’ve got players that are constantly injured and/or over 30 so we need to start to replace them.
That's if you believe what Palmer has said over what Pep has said. There were plenty of ITK (including on here) at the time saying that he was desperate to leave and didn't care about City because he was a rag fan - His interview about only wanting to go out on loan seemed like a deflection to me, to keep the heat off of himself.
At the time it was the correct decision to do what we did (and we could only make that decision on the information available at the time) - we probably should have got more money for him in hindsight (but even the amount we got was decried at the time as OTT by the press). Players move on all the time and his continued success is still a testament to how great our academy is - It looks like an even worse decision now I think as its just been compounded by other mistakes regarding squad imbalance (also we let Mahrez go which wasn't originally in the plan for last summer).
I am concenred that if Foden continues his slump we will regrest it even more.
There’s no difference between what Pep has said and what Palmer has said. They both say that Palmer asked to leave, however Palmer goes further by saying it was on loan. Pep doesn’t specify. Do you think if Palmer was lying Pep would just let him lie and continue to make him look stupid?