ant london wrote:I don't disagree that both players have less than ideal characters in lots of ways. BUT Mancini just ignored completely the fact that his employers had chosen to invest probably upwards of 50million quid (fees and wages) in those assets and that his actions essentially rendered them worthless....actually worse than useless, made them an actual burden and a source of financial restriction for the club.
If that's the kind of thing that would happen more if he got the "more control" that he'd like then I'm pretty happy to retain the status quo.
Correspondingly and on topic I don't think Cookie and Marwood have handled the Nasri and general summer of recruitment awfully well from what we can see....although I understand the fact that we want to send a signal out that we are no longer prime contenders for dry humping on deals.
I can see both sides of the story but much as he's getting exasperated Roberto should take a look in the mirror for a major source of his problems
I don't think he ignored anything. He knew that he was taking a big risk. If he cut out Adebayor etc and didn't succeed, he was giving himself more rope to hang himself. He got results first with minimal changes in the squad, later he made purchases.
The players we bought in our panic buying phase don't appear to have been very successful overall and the club had to go through a whole new phase of rebuilding.
We bought a lot of players who were always looking to be overpriced, especially in the long term. Yes there was an urgency in terms of building a squad but the irony is that we weren't going that. I think we pretty much all suspected that Bridge, RSC and Bellamy wouldn't be team regulars long before their contracts expired. We've been buying players who we know we won't be able to sell, at times. We have to be really careful doing that. We won't have much chance of getting our money back for Nasri, even though he's 24.
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